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The program is put in a really strange and non-helpful administrative location for the excitement of global investment in the United States. We are offering away as well much for also tiny of an investment.


The regional centers, with their half-million plans, basically undercut the much more reasonable million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in any way, as they carry out in Australia, should have to do with producing business entities, not easy investments. It should be regarding producing genuine tasks, not clarify calculations about the indirect production of tasks, which is currently part of the regulation.


Maybe that is among the reasons it has actually stopped working year after year to get to the legislative goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is also loaded with intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has more than its share of rumors, which I will certainly obtain into later on if any person is interested.


This is an agency that loves to claim yes to candidates, but as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS policemans have far more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has actually truly chatted about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of internal rejections in this program and permanently factor

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people that can not get them differently and to individuals whose organized financial investment is really less, according to the Federal Get, than the typical mean internet worth of all American family members in 2007. Allow me increase on one of my monitorings.


My price quote based upon the financiers' permit applications submitted 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 validated-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not give the kind of information that we could make use of on this.


So for each $100 of raised international investment that year, the EB program added one penny. Under a far more unsteady statistical base, the initial applications of prospective immigrant investors, USCIS is informing journalists that the level of financial investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thank you for paying attention to me. I eagerly anticipate your remarks and inquiries. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like an entry read more for the record.] 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 immigration practice team.




Divine offered as Chief Advice of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Director, and after that Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has actually worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive practice. He was chosen, as I recognize, vice president of the Organization to Buy United States, the nationwide 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 United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 slots were used, it would certainly be 1 percent of the migration annually to the USA. It is not near that yet, yet it is expanding and getting towards that. Especially as USCIS, the company that oversees the program, has actually been making the guidelines clearer and the procedures extra logical and clear for the people who are organizing financial investments and for the investors who are investing, more people have actually wanted and able to put effort and cash into the procedure to discover great projects and develop them, and after that extra financiers have actually wanted to spend their cash and take the threat and utilize the cash to produce the work that is the point of the program.

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These tasks do not wait about permanently, and USCIS recognizes that and are trying to speed up the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, as a matter of fact, they are all set to deny applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was mentioned


The local center part of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations bill that was established in 1992, and considering that then that program has actually been expanded 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiration in September.


The process takes a good while to function up a task and then to obtain the financiers approved. And they do not want their cash flowing through up until they have actually been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is already dissuading the advancement of projects.

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I would love to clarify 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 feature of the regular EB-5 legislation that becomes part of the code. It just is a reality that a lot of the regional facilities that are pooling financial investments have established those in areas of high unemployment or in country areas where half- million-dollar investments are permitted, which makes good sense.