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The program is placed in a very strange and non-helpful bureaucratic location for the stimulation of international investment in the United States. Second, its range is all incorrect. We are distributing way too much for too tiny of a financial investment. Better, raising equity capital half a million dollars a tranche is, to state the least, inefficient.


The regional facilities, with their half-million plans, basically undercut the a lot more sensible million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them at all, as they perform in Australia, need to be regarding producing company entities, not easy investments. It ought to be concerning producing real tasks, not specify estimations about the indirect creation of work, which is now component of the regulation.


Maybe that is one of the reasons it has failed year after year to get to the legal objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is inherently awkward, and the program is as well loaded with middlemen, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will certainly enter into later if anybody is interested.


This is a company that likes to say yes to applicants, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have a lot a lot more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has truly spoken about much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of internal rejections in this program and completely reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people that could not obtain them otherwise and to individuals whose planned investment is really less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the average mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Let me expand on among my monitorings.


My estimate based on the capitalists' copyright applications submitted 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the solid ones that continue to be and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million validated-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not provide the sort of data that we could utilize on this.


For every $100 of raised foreign financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one cent. Under a far more shaky statistical base, the preliminary applications of prospective immigrant capitalists, USCIS is telling reporters that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Allow us approve that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I expect your remarks and inquiries. [The prepared statement of David North appears as an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the company's migration practice group.




Divine functioned as Chief Advice of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Providers from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and then Acting Deputy Supervisor. He has worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive technique. He was elected, as I recognize, vice head of state of the Organization to Spend in U.S.A., the nationwide market organization of local.


Divine, we are thrilled to have you below. Please go click here in advance, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, PURCHASE THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At a lot of, if all 10,000 slots were utilized, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration yearly to the USA. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and obtaining toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the firm that looks after the program, has actually been making the policies more clear and the processes much more rational and clear for the individuals that are organizing investments and for the investors who are spending, even more individuals have agreed and able to put effort and cash right into the procedure to locate great tasks and establish them, and after that a lot more investors have been ready to invest their money and take the danger and utilize the cash to produce the jobs that is the factor of the program.

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These tasks do not wait around for life, and USCIS recognizes that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed up the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are relaxing their analysis, and, actually, they are all set to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The regional facility component of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations bill that was passed in 1992, and because then that program has been extended 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The process takes a good while to develop a project and after that to get the investors authorized. And they do not want their cash moving via until they have been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is already discouraging the development of projects.

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I would love to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a function of the normal EB-5 regulation that is part of the code. It simply is a reality that most of the local centers that are pooling investments have established those instead of high unemployment or in rural locations where half- million-dollar financial investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.