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The program is placed in an extremely weird and non-helpful administrative location for the stimulation of international investment in the United States. Second, its range is all incorrect. We are distributing way too much for too little of a financial investment. Further, raising financial backing half a million dollars a tranche is, to say the least, inefficient.


The local centers, with their half-million systems, basically damaged the much more practical million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in any way, as they perform in Australia, must be regarding producing service entities, not easy investments. It ought to have to do with developing genuine jobs, not clarify estimations concerning the indirect development of jobs, which is currently part of the regulations.


Perhaps that is among the factors why it has fallen short every year to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is too full of intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has more than its share of scandals, which I will certainly get involved in later on if any person is interested.


This is an agency that enjoys to state yes to candidates, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS policemans have far more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has truly chatted about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of inner denials in this program and completely factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals that might not get them differently and to people whose organized financial investment is in fact much less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Allow me expand on among my observations.


My price quote based on the financiers' eco-friendly card applications filed 2 years after the first investment-- these are the strong ones that continue to be and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not provide the sort of information that we might utilize on this.


So for every single $100 of increased international financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one cent. Under a a lot more wobbly analytical base, the preliminary applications of would-be immigrant investors, USCIS is informing 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 paying attention to me. I expect your remarks and inquiries. [The prepared statement of David North looks like an entry for the document.] 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 migration technique group.




Divine acted as Principal Advice of the United States Citizenship and Migration Services from July 2004 up until resource November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Director, and afterwards Performing Deputy Director. He has actually worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive practice. He was elected, as I recognize, vice president of the Association to Invest in United States, the nationwide market organization of local.


Divine, we are happy to have you below. Please go on, sir. DECLARATION OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, INVEST IN THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At many, if all 10,000 slots were used, 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 supervises the program, has actually been making the policies more clear and the procedures extra rational and clear for the people who are organizing financial investments and for the capitalists that are spending, even more individuals have actually agreed and able to put initiative and cash into the process to locate excellent projects and create them, and afterwards more financiers have wanted to spend their cash and take the risk and utilize the cash to produce the work that is the point of the program.

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These jobs do not wait around permanently, and USCIS comprehends that and are trying to speed the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate link that they are relaxing their examination, and, actually, they are ready to refute applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was mentioned


The regional facility component of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations costs that was enacted in 1992, and considering that then that program has been prolonged five 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 expiry in September.


The procedure takes an excellent while to work up a task and then to obtain the investors authorized. And they do not want their cash streaming through until they have been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is currently inhibiting the advancement of jobs.

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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 routine EB-5 legislation that becomes part of the code. It just is a fact that the majority of the regional facilities that are merging investments have set those instead of high joblessness this hyperlink or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar financial investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.