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The program is positioned in a very strange and non-helpful administrative location for the stimulation of worldwide investment in the United States. Second, its range is all wrong. We are handing out also much for too tiny of a financial investment. Further, increasing venture resources fifty percent a million bucks a tranche is, to say the least, ineffective.


The regional facilities, with their half-million systems, basically damaged the more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them at all, as they do in Australia, should have to do with developing service entities, not passive financial investments. It needs to have to do with developing actual jobs, not elaborate estimations concerning the indirect creation of jobs, which is now component of the legislation.


Perhaps that is among the reasons why it has stopped working every year to reach the legal objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is as well loaded with intermediaries, both public and private. The program has even more than its share of scandals, which I will enter into later on if any person is interested.


This is an agency that enjoys to say yes to candidates, however as the table in my statement reveals, USCIS officers have far more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that no one has actually really discussed a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of interior denials in this program and forever reason

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people who might not obtain them any other way and to individuals whose planned financial investment is really much less, according to the Federal Book, than the average mean web well worth of all American households in 2007. Allow me increase on among my monitorings.


My quote based upon the investors' permit applications submitted 2 years after the first investment-- these are the solid ones that remain and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had regarding $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not offer the sort of data that we can utilize on this.


For every $100 of increased foreign financial investment that year, the EB program added one dime. Under a far more unsteady statistical base, the initial applications of potential immigrant investors, USCIS is informing reporters that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year was concerning $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thank click here you for listening to me. I expect your remarks and inquiries. [The ready statement of David North shows up as a submission for the document.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's migration technique group.




Divine served as Chief Counsel of the United States Citizenship and Migration Services from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Director, and after that Acting Deputy Supervisor. He has functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was elected, as I understand, vice head of state of the Association to Spend in United States, the national industry association of regional.


Divine, we are pleased to have you below. Please go ahead, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, ATTORNEY, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, BUY THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thank you for having me.


At most, if all 10,000 slots were made use of, it would be 1 percent of the immigration yearly to the USA. It is not near that yet, however it is growing and getting toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the agency that manages the program, has been making the policies clearer and the procedures more reasonable and clear for the people who are organizing financial investments and for the investors that are investing, even more individuals have been willing and able to put effort and cash into the process to locate good projects and establish them, and after that more financiers have actually agreed to invest their cash and take the threat and make use of the cash to develop the work that is the factor of the program.

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These tasks do not linger permanently, and USCIS understands that and are attempting to speed the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are unwinding their analysis, and, as a matter of fact, they are prepared to reject applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The local center component of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations bill that was established in 1992, and ever since that program has actually been extended five 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 a good while to develop a task and after that to obtain the capitalists approved. And they do not desire their money streaming with up until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Center Program in September is already discouraging the development of projects.

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I want to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar point. The idea of half a million or a million is a function of the regular EB-5 legislation that is component of the code. It simply is a fact that most of the regional centers that are merging investments have actually established those in places of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are enabled, which makes good sense.