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First, the program is positioned in a really strange and non-helpful administrative area for the excitement of worldwide financial investment in the USA. Second, its scale is all wrong. We are giving away way too much for too little of a financial investment. Further, raising financial backing fifty percent a million bucks a tranche is, to state the least, inefficient.


The regional facilities, with their half-million plans, basically undercut the a lot more reasonable million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them at all, as they do in Australia, ought to have to do with producing company entities, not passive investments. It needs to be concerning producing genuine work, not specify calculations about the indirect development of tasks, which is currently part of the legislation.


Perhaps that is among the reasons that it has actually fallen short time after time to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is inherently clumsy, and the program is also full of intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has more than its share of rumors, which I will certainly get involved in later if anyone is interested.


This is an agency that loves to say yes to applicants, however as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS police officers have far more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that nobody has actually truly spoken around a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of interior denials in this program and permanently factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people who can not get them differently and to individuals whose scheduled financial investment is in fact less, according to the Federal Get, than the average mean net worth of all American households in 2007. Allow me broaden on among my observations.


My quote based upon the capitalists' permit applications submitted 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had regarding $191 million validated-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not supply the type of data that we can make use of on this.


For every $100 of increased international financial investment that year, the EB program added one cent. Under a much a lot more shaky analytical base, the preliminary applications of potential immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thank you for paying attention to me. I look ahead to your remarks and concerns. [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 worked as Principal Counsel of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Director, and after that Performing Replacement Supervisor. He has worked extensively with the EB-5 program in private method. He was elected, as I comprehend, vice head of state of the Association to Spend in USA, the national industry association of regional.


Divine, we are thrilled to have you below. Please go on, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE HEAD OF STATE, you can find out more PURCHASE THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At most, if all 10,000 ports were utilized, it would be 1 percent of the immigration every year to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is expanding and obtaining toward that. Specifically as USCIS, the company that manages the program, has been making the regulations clearer and the procedures extra sensible and clear for individuals that are organizing investments and for the investors who are investing, even more people have been willing and able to put initiative and money into the procedure to discover good projects and develop them, and after that more capitalists have been prepared to spend their money and take the risk and make use of the cash to develop the tasks that is the point of the program.

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These tasks 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 indicate that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was pointed out


The local center part of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations bill 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 date of expiry in September.


The procedure takes a good while to develop a project and go to my site then to obtain the investors accepted. And they do not desire their cash flowing with until they have been approved. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is already inhibiting the growth of jobs.

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I want to make clear that the Regional Facility Program is not the like the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a function of the regular EB-5 regulation that belongs to the code. It simply is a fact that most of the local centers that are pooling investments have actually set those instead of high joblessness or in website here backwoods where half- million-dollar financial investments are permitted, which makes sense.