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The program is placed in an extremely odd and non-helpful administrative place for the stimulation of worldwide investment in the United States. We are offering away also much for too tiny of a financial investment.


The local centers, with their half-million plans, essentially undercut the much more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they perform in Australia, must be about producing business entities, not passive financial investments. It ought to have to do with developing actual work, not specify calculations concerning the indirect development of work, which is currently component of the legislation.


Maybe that is one of the reasons it has actually fallen short year after year to get to the legal goal of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is inherently awkward, and the program is also loaded with intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has even more than its share of scandals, which I will certainly obtain into later if anyone is interested.


This is a company that loves to claim yes to candidates, but as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS police officers have far more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that no one has truly spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of internal rejections in this program and permanently reason

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Seventh, in this program visas go to individuals who can not get them otherwise and to people whose organized financial investment is actually less, according to the Federal Book, than the ordinary mean web well worth of all American family members in 2007. Allow me broaden on among my observations.


My quote based upon the capitalists' eco-friendly card applications submitted 2 years after the initial financial investment-- these are the solid ones that remain and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had concerning $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not offer the sort of data that we might make use of on this.


So for each $100 of enhanced foreign financial investment that year, the EB program added one dime. Under a much more shaky statistical base, the first applications of would-be immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling journalists that the level of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Allow us approve that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I anticipate your comments and inquiries. [The prepared declaration of David North appears as a submission for the document.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the company's migration technique team.




Divine offered as Chief Guidance of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Director, and after that Acting Deputy Director. He has worked extensively with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was chosen, as I understand, vice president of the Organization to Purchase USA, the national sector association of regional centers.


STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, ATTORNEY, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, INVEST IN THE USA (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 ports were used, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration each year to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is expanding and obtaining toward that. Especially as USCIS, the agency that supervises the program, has actually been making the policies more clear and the procedures more rational and clear for individuals that are arranging investments and for the capitalists who are investing, more individuals have actually wanted and able to place effort and cash into the procedure to discover great tasks and develop them, and after that much more investors have actually been ready to spend their money and take the threat and utilize the money to develop the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These jobs do not wait around permanently, and USCIS comprehends that and are trying to speed up the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are unwinding their examination, and, actually, they are prepared to reject applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The local center part of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations expense that was established in 1992, and ever since that program has actually 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 date of expiration in September.


The procedure takes an excellent while to function up a project and afterwards to obtain the capitalists authorized. And they do not desire their cash moving via until they have actually been accepted. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is already discouraging the development of tasks.

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I would love to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 legislation get more info that becomes part of the code. It just is a reality that many of the regional centers that are merging investments have established those in locations of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar financial investments are permitted, and that makes good sense.