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The program is placed in an extremely odd and non-helpful administrative location for the excitement of worldwide financial investment in the United States. We are giving away as well much for too little of an investment.


The regional facilities, with their half-million plans, essentially undercut the more reasonable million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in any way, as they do in Australia, must have to do with developing business entities, not passive financial investments. It should be concerning producing real work, not clarify computations concerning the indirect production of jobs, which is currently component of the legislation.


Perhaps that is among the reasons it has failed year after year to get to the legal goal of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is inherently awkward, and the program is too filled up with middlemen, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of rumors, which I will enter into later on if any person is interested.


This is an agency that enjoys to state yes to candidates, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have a lot a lot more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that nobody has actually actually talked about much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of interior denials in this program and for excellent reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals who might not get them otherwise and to people whose planned investment is actually less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean web well worth of all American family members in 2007. Allow me expand on among my observations.


My quote based on the financiers' permit applications filed 2 years after the very first financial investment-- these are the strong ones that continue to be and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had concerning $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not supply the kind of data that we can make use of on this.


So for every $100 of enhanced international financial investment that year, the EB program added one cent. Under a far more shaky statistical base, the preliminary applications of would-be immigrant investors, USCIS is telling reporters that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year was about $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I eagerly anticipate your comments and questions. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like 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 method group.




Divine acted as Chief Advise of the United States Citizenship and Migration Services from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Director, and afterwards Acting Deputy Supervisor. He has actually worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive technique. He was elected, as I recognize, vice head of state of the Organization to Buy United States, the national industry organization of regional facilities.


Divine, we are thrilled to have you right here. Please go ahead, sir. 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. Thank you for having me.


At most, if all 10,000 slots were used, it would be 1 percent of the migration yearly to the United States. It is not near that yet, however it is growing and getting toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the company that looks after the program, has been making the guidelines more clear and the procedures more sensible and clear for the people who are organizing financial investments and for the financiers who are investing, check this more individuals have actually agreed and able to place initiative and money right into the procedure to find excellent projects and create them, and afterwards much more capitalists have actually wanted to spend their money and take the danger and use 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 attempting to speed the program, speed up the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, actually, they are all set to reject applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was pointed out


The local facility component of the program is not. It is component 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 permanent, and it needs to be done currently and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The procedure takes Full Article a great while to develop check it out a project and after that to get the capitalists authorized. And they do not want their money streaming via until they have actually been authorized. 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 would like to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The idea 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 truth that many of the regional centers that are merging financial investments have actually set those instead of high unemployment or in rural locations where half- million-dollar financial investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.