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The program is put in a very weird and non-helpful administrative area for the excitement of global financial investment in the United States. Second, its scale is all incorrect. We are distributing too much for also tiny of an investment. Better, increasing venture resources half a million bucks a tranche is, to state the least, ineffective.


The local centers, with their half-million schemes, essentially damaged the much more reasonable million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in all, as they perform in Australia, should be about creating business entities, not passive investments. It needs to have to do with producing genuine tasks, not clarify calculations about the indirect development of jobs, which is now part of the regulation.


Perhaps that is among the reasons that it has fallen short year after year to reach the legal goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is inherently awkward, and the program is too loaded with intermediaries, both public and private. The program has more than its share of scandals, which I will certainly enter into later if anyone is interested.


This is an agency that likes to state yes to applicants, however as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS policemans have much a lot more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has truly spoken around much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of interior rejections in this program and completely factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people that can not get them any various other way and to individuals whose planned investment is really much less, according to the Federal Book, than the average mean web worth of all American households in 2007. Let me broaden on among my monitorings.


My quote based upon the capitalists' permit applications filed 2 years after the initial investment-- these are the strong ones that remain and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not provide the kind of information that we could use on this.


For every $100 of boosted international investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a much more wobbly statistical base, the preliminary applications of prospective immigrant capitalists, USCIS is informing journalists that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year was regarding $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thank you for paying attention to me. I look onward to your remarks and inquiries. [The ready statement of David North shows up as a submission for the document.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's immigration practice team.




Divine offered as Principal Counsel of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Providers from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and afterwards Acting Deputy Supervisor. He has worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was chosen, as I recognize, vice president of the Association to Spend in United States, the national market association of regional.


Divine, we are thrilled 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, BUY THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thank you for having me.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 ports were utilized, it would be 1 percent of the migration yearly to the United States. It is not near that yet, however it is expanding and obtaining towards that. Particularly as USCIS, the firm that oversees the program, has actually been making the policies clearer and the processes much more logical and clear for individuals who are organizing financial investments and for the financiers that are investing, even more people have been willing and able to put initiative and cash into the process to discover good jobs and develop them, and after that extra investors have wanted to invest their money and take the danger and use the cash to produce the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These projects do not linger 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 unwinding their scrutiny, and, actually, they are all set to refute applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The local facility part of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations expense that was passed in 1992, and ever since that program has actually been prolonged 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it needs check here to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The procedure takes a great while to work up a task and after that to obtain the capitalists approved. And they do not desire their cash flowing through until they have been authorized. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Center Program in September is already inhibiting the growth of jobs.

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I would certainly like to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The concept of half a million or a million is a function of the routine EB-5 law that becomes part of the code. It simply is a reality that most of the regional facilities that are pooling financial investments have actually set those in locations of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are enabled, which makes sense.