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Initially, the program is put in a very strange and non-helpful bureaucratic place for the stimulation of global investment in the United States. Second, its range is all incorrect. We are distributing way too much for as well little of a financial investment. Better, raising venture funding half a million dollars a tranche is, to state the least, ineffective.

The local facilities, with their half-million schemes, basically undercut the extra practical million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in any way, as they do in Australia, need to be regarding creating service entities, not passive financial investments. It ought to have to do with producing actual work, not specify estimations regarding the indirect creation of tasks, which is currently part of the regulation.


Perhaps that is just one of the reasons it has actually failed every year to reach the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is as well full of middlemen, both public and personal. The program has even more than its share of scandals, which I will certainly obtain into later if anyone is interested.


This is a firm that loves to state yes to candidates, but as the table in my statement reveals, USCIS officers have far more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that nobody has actually really spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of internal denials in this program and permanently reason

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people who could not obtain them differently and to individuals whose organized financial investment is really much less, according to the Federal Book, than the typical mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Let me increase on among my observations.


My quote based on the investors' permit applications filed 2 years after the initial financial investment-- these are the solid ones that stay and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had concerning $191 million validated-- that is my quote. USCIS does not supply the kind of data that we can utilize on this.


So for each $100 of enhanced international financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a much a lot more wobbly analytical base, the first applications of would-be immigrant investors, USCIS is telling journalists that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year was regarding $1.2 billion. Allow us approve that.

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Thanks for paying attention to me. I eagerly anticipate your comments and concerns. [The ready declaration of David North looks like an entry for the record.] 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 technique team.

Divine worked as Chief Advice of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Services from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Director, and after that Acting Deputy Supervisor. He has functioned extensively with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was elected, as I understand, vice head of state of the Organization to Invest in United States, the national sector association of local.


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


At the majority of, if all 10,000 slots were made use of, it would be 1 percent of the immigration each year to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and getting towards that. Specifically as USCIS, the company that looks after the program, has been making the policies more clear and the processes a lot more sensible and clear for individuals that are organizing financial investments and for the financiers that are more info spending, more people have been eager and able to place effort and money right into the procedure to locate good jobs and create them, and after that more financiers have actually agreed to invest their money and take the risk and utilize the cash to develop the work that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not linger for life, and USCIS recognizes that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are unwinding their analysis, and, actually, they are ready to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was pointed out

The regional facility component of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations costs that was passed in 1992, and ever since that program has been expanded five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The procedure takes a great while to work up a project and afterwards to get the financiers accepted. And they do not want their money moving via until they have actually been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently preventing the growth of projects.

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I would love to make clear that the Regional Center Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar point. The idea of half a million or a million is a function of the regular EB-5 legislation that belongs to the code. It simply is a truth that a lot of the regional centers that are pooling investments have established those in places of high joblessness or in backwoods where half- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.