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The program is placed in a really odd and non-helpful bureaucratic place for the stimulation of global financial investment in the United States. Second, its scale is all wrong. We are handing out excessive for also little of an investment. Better, increasing equity capital half a million dollars a tranche is, to say the least, inefficient.


The regional centers, with their half-million plans, essentially damaged the more reasonable million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them at all, as they perform in Australia, need to have to do with creating company entities, not passive investments. It needs to have to do with producing genuine tasks, not elaborate computations concerning the indirect production of work, which is currently component of the legislation.


Possibly that is just one of the reasons that it has fallen short every year to reach the legal objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is as well full of intermediaries, both public and exclusive. The program has more than its share of rumors, which I will certainly enter later on if anybody is interested.


This is a firm that enjoys to claim yes to candidates, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have far more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has really spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of inner rejections in this program and completely factor

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people that could not obtain them otherwise and to individuals whose scheduled investment is actually less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the ordinary mean internet well worth of all American households in 2007. Let me broaden on among my monitorings.


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


So for every single $100 of increased international financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a much more wobbly statistical base, the preliminary applications of prospective immigrant investors, USCIS is telling journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us approve that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I look ahead to your remarks and concerns. [The ready declaration of David North appears 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 company's immigration practice team.




Divine worked as Chief Advise of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Services from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Director, and afterwards Acting Replacement Director. He has worked extensively with the EB-5 program secretive technique. He was elected, as I understand, vice president of the Association to Purchase United States, the national market association of regional centers.


Divine, we are pleased to have check here you right here. Please proceed, sir. DECLARATION OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, PURCHASE THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thank you for having me.


At a lot of, if all 10,000 ports were made use of, it would be 1 percent of the migration annually to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is expanding and obtaining toward that. Specifically as USCIS, the firm that manages the program, has been making the guidelines more clear and the procedures much more logical and clear for the people that are organizing investments and for the financiers that are spending, more people have agreed and able to place effort and money right into the procedure to locate good projects and create them, and afterwards extra investors have wanted to invest their money and take the risk and utilize the cash to create the tasks that is the point of the program.

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These projects do not linger for life, and USCIS understands that and are trying to speed up the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are relaxing their analysis, and, actually, they are ready to deny applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was stated


The local center component of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations bill that was established in 1992, and given that then that program has actually been prolonged five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be irreversible, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The procedure takes an excellent while to develop a task and after that to obtain the investors approved. And they do not desire their money moving with until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is already inhibiting the growth of projects.

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I wish to make clear that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the regular EB-5 law that belongs to the code. It just is a reality that the majority of the local centers that are pooling investments have established those instead of high unemployment or in rural areas where fifty percent- million-dollar financial investments are permitted, which makes good sense.