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The program is placed in a really odd and non-helpful administrative place for the stimulation of worldwide investment in the United States. We are providing away as well much for as well little of a financial investment.


The local facilities, with their half-million systems, basically damaged the much more reasonable million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them at all, as they do in Australia, ought to be concerning creating organization entities, not passive investments. It must have to do with creating actual tasks, not specify computations about the indirect production of tasks, which is currently component of the legislation.


Perhaps that is just one of the reasons that it has failed year after year to get to the legal goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally awkward, and the program is as well full of intermediaries, both public and exclusive. The program has even more than its share of scandals, which I will enter later if anybody is interested.


This is a firm that enjoys to state yes to candidates, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have a lot more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has truly spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of interior denials in this program and permanently factor

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people who can not get them differently and to individuals whose planned investment is actually less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Let me expand on among my observations.


My estimate based upon the financiers' permit applications filed 2 years after the initial financial investment-- these are the solid ones that remain and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million validated-- that is my quote. USCIS does not supply the type of data that we can make use of on this.


So for every single $100 of raised international investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a a lot more wobbly analytical base, the first applications of would-be immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling reporters that the level of financial investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I look ahead to your remarks and concerns. [The ready statement of David North looks like an entry for the record.] 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 firm's immigration practice group.




Divine worked as Principal Guidance of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in check here which he was Performing Director, and after that Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has worked extensively with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was chosen, as I understand, vice president of the Association to Purchase USA, the national market organization of local facilities.


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


At many, if all 10,000 ports were utilized, 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 toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the agency that supervises the program, has actually been making the policies more clear and the procedures more sensible and clear for individuals that are organizing investments and for the investors that are spending, more people have been ready and able to put effort and money into the process to discover excellent tasks and create them, and afterwards extra capitalists have actually been willing to spend their cash and take the threat and utilize the cash to produce the jobs that is the factor of the program.

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These tasks do not linger forever, and USCIS comprehends that and are trying to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, in truth, they prepare to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The regional facility component of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations expense that was passed in 1992, and considering that then that program has actually been prolonged five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The procedure takes a good while to develop a task and after that to obtain the financiers accepted. And they do not want their money moving via until they have actually been authorized. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Center Program in September is already dissuading the advancement of tasks.

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I would like to make clear that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the regular EB-5 law that is component of the code. It simply is a fact that a lot of the local facilities that are pooling investments have established those in areas of high unemployment or in country locations where half- million-dollar investments are allowed, which makes good sense.