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The program is put in a really odd and non-helpful administrative area for the excitement of international investment in the United States. Second, its range is all wrong. We are providing away excessive for too little of a financial investment. Even more, raising endeavor resources half a million bucks a tranche is, to say the least, inefficient.


The local centers, with their half-million plans, essentially undercut the extra practical million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in any way, as they perform in Australia, ought to be concerning creating service entities, not passive investments. It should have to do with developing actual jobs, not specify computations regarding the indirect production of work, which is now part of the legislation.


Probably that is just one of the reasons that it has stopped working year after year to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally awkward, and the program is also full of middlemen, both public and exclusive. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will get involved in later on if anyone is interested.


This is a firm that enjoys to state yes to candidates, yet as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS policemans have much more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has really spoken around much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of interior denials in this program and for good reason

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people who can not get them differently and to people whose scheduled investment is in fact less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean internet worth of all American family members in 2007. Let me broaden on among my observations.


My price quote based upon the investors' permit applications filed 2 years after the 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 estimate. USCIS does not offer the type of data that we might make use of on this.


For every $100 of boosted international financial investment that year, the EB program added one penny. Under a far more wobbly analytical base, the first applications of would-be immigrant capitalists, USCIS is telling 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 you for listening to me. I eagerly anticipate your remarks and inquiries. [The ready declaration of David North looks like an entry for the record.] 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 company's migration method team.




Divine worked as Chief Advise of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Providers from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and after that Acting Deputy Director. He has worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was chosen, as I understand, vice president of the Organization to Buy United States, the national sector association of regional facilities.


Divine, we are happy to have you here. Please go on, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, PURCHASE THE USA (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thank you for having me.


At many, if all 10,000 slots were used, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration annually to the USA. It is not near that yet, however it is growing and obtaining towards that. Particularly as USCIS, the firm that looks after the program, has been making the policies more clear and the procedures more logical and clear for the individuals who are arranging investments and for the investors who are investing, more individuals have wanted and able to place effort and money into the process to locate click here good jobs and establish them, and afterwards much more financiers have been willing to spend their cash and take the danger and utilize the money to produce the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These jobs do not wait around forever, and USCIS understands that and are trying to speed the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, in reality, they prepare to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was mentioned


The local center part of the program is not. It is component of an appropriations expense that was passed in 1992, and considering that 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 now and not nearer to the date of expiration in September.


The process takes a great while to develop a project and afterwards to obtain the financiers authorized. And they do not want their cash flowing through until they have actually been authorized. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently dissuading the development of projects.

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I would like to make clear that the Regional Center Program is not the same as the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 regulation that becomes part of the code. It just is a reality that most of the regional centers that are pooling financial investments have established those instead of high joblessness or in backwoods where half- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes sense.