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The program is placed in a very weird and non-helpful governmental area for the excitement of global investment in the United States. Second, its range is all wrong. We are handing out way too much for too tiny of a financial investment. Additionally, elevating financial backing half a million dollars a tranche is, to claim the least, ineffective.


The regional centers, with their half-million schemes, basically undercut the extra sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in all, as they perform in Australia, must have to do with developing company entities, not passive investments. It needs to have to do with creating genuine work, not elaborate calculations about the indirect development of jobs, which is now part of the legislation.


Probably that is one of the reasons that it has failed year after year to get to the legislative goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is too loaded with middlemen, both public and private. The program has more than its share of scandals, which I will certainly obtain right into later on if any person is interested.


This is a company that enjoys to state yes to applicants, yet as the table in my statement shows, USCIS policemans have a lot more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that no one has actually really discussed a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of internal rejections in this program and completely factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals that can not get them otherwise and to individuals whose planned financial investment is actually less, according to the Federal Book, than the typical mean total assets of all American households in 2007. Allow me increase on one of my observations.


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


So for every $100 of increased international investment that year, the EB program contributed one cent. Under a far more wobbly statistical base, the first applications of would-be immigrant investors, USCIS see it here is telling reporters 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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Thanks for paying attention to me. I expect your remarks and concerns. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like a submission for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the company's immigration practice team.




Divine acted as Chief Advice of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Director, and after that Performing Replacement Supervisor. He has functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive technique. He was elected, as I recognize, vice president of the Association to Purchase U.S.A., the national market association of browse around here regional centers.


Divine, we are pleased to have you right here. Please go ahead, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, PURCHASE THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At many, if all 10,000 ports were made use of, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration annually to the USA. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and getting towards that. Particularly as USCIS, the company that oversees the program, has been making the guidelines more clear and the procedures more logical and clear for individuals who are organizing financial investments and for the financiers who are spending, more people have wanted and able to put effort and money into the process to discover excellent tasks and establish them, and after that a lot more capitalists have wanted to invest their cash and take the danger and use the cash to create the tasks that is the factor of the program.

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These jobs do not wait around for life, and USCIS comprehends that and are attempting to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are unwinding their analysis, and, in reality, they prepare to reject applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The regional center part of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations bill that was passed in 1992, and ever since that program has been expanded 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be look at this site long-term, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The process takes an excellent while to function up a project and afterwards to obtain the financiers authorized. And they do not desire their money flowing via until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is already preventing the development of projects.

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I would love to clarify that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar point. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the normal EB-5 regulation that belongs to the code. It simply is a truth that a lot of the local centers that are merging investments have actually established those in places of high joblessness or in country locations where half- million-dollar financial investments are permitted, which makes good sense.