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The program is positioned in an extremely odd and non-helpful bureaucratic location for the stimulation of worldwide investment in the United States. Second, its range is all wrong. We are handing out way too much for also tiny of an investment. Additionally, raising financial backing half a million bucks a tranche is, to claim the least, inefficient.


The regional centers, with their half-million plans, basically damaged the much more reasonable million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in any way, as they do in Australia, should have to do with producing service entities, not easy financial investments. It should have to do with developing genuine jobs, not clarify calculations regarding the indirect production of work, which is now part of the legislation.


Perhaps that is one of the reasons it has actually stopped working every year to reach the legal objective of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is inherently awkward, and the program is as well full of middlemen, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will certainly get involved in later on if anybody is interested.


This is a company that enjoys to claim yes to applicants, yet as the table in my testament reveals, USCIS officers have a lot more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has really discussed a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of inner denials in this program and forever reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people that can not obtain them any other way and to people whose organized financial investment is actually less, according to the Federal Get, than the typical mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Allow me broaden on among my observations.


My estimate based on the investors' permit applications submitted 2 years after the very first financial investment-- these are the solid ones that continue to be and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million validated-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not offer the type of information that we could make use of on this.


For every $100 of boosted international investment that year, the EB program contributed one cent. Under a much more shaky statistical base, the preliminary applications of more info would-be immigrant financiers, USCIS is informing reporters that the level of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us approve that.

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Thank you for paying attention to me. I look forward to your remarks and inquiries. [The ready declaration of David North looks like an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's migration practice group.




Divine functioned as Chief Counsel of the USA Citizenship and Migration Solutions from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and afterwards Acting Deputy Supervisor. He has functioned extensively with the EB-5 program secretive practice. He was elected, as I recognize, vice head of state of the Organization to Invest in United States, the national industry association of regional.


DECLARATION OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE HEAD OF STATE, INVEST IN THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others.


At a lot of, if all 10,000 ports were used, it would be 1 percent of the migration yearly to the United States. It is not near that yet, however it is expanding and obtaining towards that. Especially as USCIS, the agency that supervises the program, has been making the rules clearer and the procedures extra reasonable and clear for individuals who are organizing financial investments and for the capitalists who are spending, more people have actually been prepared and able to put initiative and money right into the process to discover good jobs and establish them, and after that extra investors have actually agreed to invest their money and take the threat and make use of the money to create the work that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not linger for life, and USCIS recognizes that and are trying to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are relaxing their scrutiny, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to deny applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The regional facility component of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations costs that was enacted in 1992, and ever since that program has been expanded 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 an excellent while to develop a project and afterwards to obtain the capitalists authorized. And they do not want their cash streaming via till they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is already inhibiting the advancement of jobs.

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I want to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the same as the half-million-dollar thing. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the regular EB-5 regulation that becomes part of the code. It just is a truth that many of the local facilities that are pooling investments have established those in locations of high joblessness or in backwoods where half- million-dollar investments are enabled, and that makes good sense.