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The program is positioned in a very strange and non-helpful administrative area for the excitement of international financial investment in the United States. We are giving away as well much for as well tiny of an investment.


The local centers, with their half-million plans, essentially damaged the a lot more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they carry out in Australia, should be about producing company entities, not easy financial investments. It needs to have to do with producing genuine tasks, not clarify estimations concerning the indirect development of jobs, which is currently part of the regulation.


Perhaps that is just one of the reasons that it has fallen short every year to reach the legal objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is inherently clumsy, and the program is too loaded with intermediaries, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of rumors, which I will enter later if anybody is interested.


This is a firm that loves to say yes to applicants, yet as the table in my statement reveals, USCIS police officers have far more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has actually actually spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of internal denials in this program and forever factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals that can not obtain them differently and to individuals whose organized financial investment is in fact less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Let me increase on one of my observations.


My estimate based on the investors' copyright applications filed 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 quote. USCIS does not offer the sort of data that we might utilize on this.


So for every $100 of increased international financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a far more shaky statistical base, the first applications of prospective immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling reporters that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year was about $1.2 billion. Allow us approve that.

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Thanks for paying attention to me. I eagerly anticipate your comments and questions. [The prepared statement of David North shows up as an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's immigration technique group.




Divine functioned as Chief Counsel of the USA Citizenship and Migration Providers from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Director, and afterwards Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has actually worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program in personal practice. He was chosen, as I recognize, vice president of the Organization to Buy U.S.A., the national industry organization of local facilities.


Divine, we are thrilled to have you here. Please go in advance, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, PURCHASE THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thank you for having me.


At most, if all 10,000 slots were utilized, it would certainly be 1 percent of the migration every year to the USA. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and getting towards that. Particularly as USCIS, the firm that supervises the program, has been making the policies clearer and the processes more sensible and clear for individuals that are arranging investments and for the financiers that are investing, more people have agreed and able to put effort and cash into the process to you can find out more locate great projects and try this site create them, and then extra investors have actually wanted to invest their cash and take the risk and make use of the money to create the tasks that is the point of the program.

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These projects do not wait about permanently, and USCIS understands that and are trying to speed the program, speed up the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are relaxing their examination, and, actually, they prepare to deny applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was pointed out


The local facility part of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations bill that was enacted in 1992, and because then that program has actually been prolonged 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be irreversible, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the day of expiry in September.


The process takes an excellent while to develop a job and then to obtain the investors accepted. And they do not want their cash flowing via till they have been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is already preventing the growth of projects.

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I wish to clear up that the Regional Center 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 regulation that is part of the code. It just is a truth that the majority of the regional facilities that are merging investments have actually established those in locations of high joblessness or in country areas where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that my company makes sense.