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Initially, the program is positioned in a really odd and non-helpful administrative place for the stimulation of international financial investment in the USA. Second, its scale is all wrong. We are giving away excessive for also tiny of a financial investment. Further, elevating financial backing half a million bucks a tranche is, to say the least, ineffective.


The regional centers, with their half-million schemes, essentially undercut the 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, ought to have to do with creating business entities, not easy investments. It ought to have to do with producing real work, not elaborate computations about the indirect creation of tasks, which is now component of the legislation.


Possibly that is one of the reasons it has actually stopped working every year to reach the legislative goal of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is inherently clumsy, and the program is also full of intermediaries, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will certainly get involved in later on if anybody is interested.


This is a company that likes to claim yes to applicants, yet as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS police officers have far more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that no one has actually actually spoken about much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of interior rejections in this program and permanently reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals that might not get them any various other means and to people whose planned financial investment is really less, according to the Federal Book, than the average mean total assets of all American households in 2007. Let me expand on among my observations.


My estimate based upon the capitalists' eco-friendly card applications filed 2 years after the very first financial investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not give the type of data that we can make use of on this.


So for each $100 of enhanced foreign investment that year, the EB program added one cent. Under a much extra unsteady statistical base, the preliminary applications of prospective immigrant capitalists, USCIS is informing journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us approve that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I anticipate your remarks and inquiries. [The prepared statement of David North looks like an entry for the document.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our read what he said following 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 functioned as Chief Advise of the USA Citizenship and Migration Providers from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and after that Performing Deputy Supervisor. He has worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program in private technique. He was elected, as I recognize, vice head of state of the Association to Buy USA, the nationwide sector association of local centers.


Divine, we are happy to have you right here. Please go on, sir. DECLARATION 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, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 slots were made use of, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration annually to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and getting toward that. Specifically as USCIS, the company that oversees the program, has been making the policies clearer and the processes much more rational and clear for the individuals that are arranging financial investments and for the investors who are investing, even more people have wanted and able to put effort and money right into the process to locate good projects and develop them, and then a lot more investors have wanted to spend their money and take the risk and utilize the money to produce the work that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not wait about for life, and USCIS comprehends that and are attempting to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are relaxing their analysis, and, actually, they prepare to refute applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The local center component of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations bill that was passed in 1992, and ever since that program has been prolonged five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be look here done now and not nearer to the day of expiry in September.


The procedure takes an excellent while to develop a task and after that to Go Here obtain the financiers authorized. And they do not want their cash flowing with until they have actually been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is already preventing the advancement of jobs.

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I would certainly such as to clear up that the Regional Facility Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the normal EB-5 legislation that is component of the code. It just is a truth that a lot of the local facilities that are merging investments have established those instead of high joblessness or in backwoods where half- million-dollar financial investments are enabled, which makes feeling.