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The program is positioned in a really odd and non-helpful bureaucratic area for the excitement of global financial investment in the United States. Second, its scale is all wrong. We are handing out excessive for also small of a financial investment. Additionally, elevating equity capital fifty percent a million dollars a tranche is, to claim the least, ineffective.


The regional centers, with their half-million plans, basically damaged the much more practical million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they do in Australia, ought to be regarding developing organization entities, not passive financial investments. It needs to be about creating real tasks, not specify calculations regarding the indirect production of work, which is currently part of the regulation.


Perhaps that is among the reasons that it has stopped working every year to reach the legal goal of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is as well full of middlemen, both public and exclusive. The program has even more than its share of detractions, which I will certainly obtain right into later if any person is interested.


This is a company that likes to say yes to candidates, but as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS officers have far more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has really discussed much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of interior denials in this program and for excellent reason

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Seventh, in this program visas go to individuals that could not get them otherwise and to individuals whose planned financial investment is really much less, according to the Federal Book, than the ordinary mean net worth of all American households in 2007. Let me expand on among my observations.


My estimate based on the investors' copyright applications submitted 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the solid ones that stay and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had regarding $191 million verified-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not provide the sort of information that we can utilize on this.


For every $100 of enhanced international financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a far more unsteady analytical base, the initial applications of prospective immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I anticipate your comments and concerns. [The ready statement of David North shows up as an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's migration technique group.




Divine here acted as Chief Guidance of the United States Citizenship and Migration Solutions from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and after that Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has actually functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive practice. He was chosen, as I comprehend, vice president of the Association to Buy United States, the national industry organization 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 most, if all 10,000 slots were utilized, it would be 1 percent of the immigration every year to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is expanding and getting toward that. Specifically as USCIS, the firm that manages the program, has been making the rules clearer and the procedures a lot more rational and clear for the people that are organizing investments and for the capitalists who are spending, even more people have agreed and able to put initiative and money into the process to find excellent jobs and establish them, and then more capitalists have wanted to invest their cash and take the threat and make use of the cash to create the work that is the factor of the program.

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These jobs do not wait about permanently, and USCIS comprehends that and are trying to speed the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are relaxing their scrutiny, and, in truth, they are all set to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was pointed out


The local facility component of the program is not. It is component of an appropriations bill that was established in 1992, and given that then that program has actually been prolonged 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, 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 job and after that to obtain the financiers authorized. And they do not desire their cash moving with till they have been authorized. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Center Program in September is already dissuading the advancement of projects.

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I wish to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is not the exact same as the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the normal EB-5 regulation that becomes part of the code. It just is a truth that the majority of the local facilities that are pooling investments have set those in areas of high unemployment or in rural locations where half- million-dollar investments are permitted, and that makes good sense.