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The program is placed in a really weird and non-helpful bureaucratic location for the stimulation of worldwide financial investment in the United States. Second, its range is all incorrect. We are distributing excessive for as well tiny of an investment. Better, raising equity capital fifty percent a million bucks a tranche is, to state the least, ineffective.


The local centers, with their half-million schemes, basically undercut the more reasonable million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they do in Australia, need to have to do with producing business entities, not easy financial investments. It should be concerning producing real work, not elaborate calculations concerning the indirect creation of work, which is now component of the regulations.


Perhaps that is among the reasons why it has actually failed year after year to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is as well full of intermediaries, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of rumors, which I will get involved in later on if any person is interested.


This is a company that enjoys to state yes to candidates, but as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS policemans have far more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has truly chatted about much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of inner rejections in this program and forever reason

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people that could not obtain them otherwise and to individuals whose scheduled financial investment is in fact less, according to the Federal Book, than the typical mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Allow me expand on one of my observations.


My price quote based on the financiers' permit applications submitted 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the solid ones that remain and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had concerning $191 million verified-- that is my quote. USCIS does not offer the kind of data that we can make use of on this.


For every $100 of raised international investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a a lot more unsteady statistical base, the first applications of prospective immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling journalists that the degree of financial 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 here your comments and inquiries. [The prepared 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 team.




Divine functioned as Chief Advice of the USA Citizenship and Migration Solutions from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and afterwards Performing Deputy Director. He has functioned extensively with the EB-5 program in private technique. He was elected, as I comprehend, vice head of state of the Organization to Spend in United States, the national market organization of regional.


Divine, we are delighted to have you right here. Please proceed, sir. DECLARATION OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, ATTORNEY, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, INVEST IN THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Legislator 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 each year to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and obtaining toward that. Especially as USCIS, the firm that manages the program, has been making the regulations clearer and the processes much more rational and clear for the individuals who are arranging investments and for the capitalists that are investing, more individuals have actually wanted and able to put initiative and money right into the process to discover excellent projects and establish them, and afterwards more investors have actually been willing to spend their money and take the threat and use the cash to develop the work that is the point of the program.

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These jobs do not wait about permanently, and USCIS recognizes that and are trying to speed up the program, speed up the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, in fact, they prepare to deny applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was pointed out


The regional facility part of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations bill that was passed in 1992, and considering that then that program has actually been prolonged 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it needs to be done currently and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The procedure takes a great while to work up a task and afterwards to get the capitalists authorized. And they do not want their cash moving with until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently dissuading the growth of projects.

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I want to make clear that the Regional Facility Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the normal EB-5 law that is component of the code. It simply is a truth that the majority of the local centers that are pooling financial investments have actually established those instead of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar financial investments are permitted, which makes feeling.