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Initially, the program is positioned in an extremely weird and non-helpful governmental place for the excitement of worldwide financial investment in the United States. Second, its scale is all incorrect. We are handing out too much for also little of a financial investment. Further, increasing equity capital half a million dollars a tranche is, to state the least, ineffective.


The regional centers, with their half-million plans, basically undercut the a lot more sensible million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them at all, as they perform in Australia, must be about developing business entities, not easy investments. It should have to do with creating real work, not elaborate estimations regarding the indirect development of jobs, which is currently part of the legislation.


Perhaps that is one of the factors why it has fallen short year after year to reach the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally awkward, and the program is also loaded with middlemen, both public and personal. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will get right into later if anyone is interested.


This is a firm that loves to claim yes to candidates, however as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS policemans have a lot extra problem with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has really chatted around a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of internal denials in this program and completely factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people who can not get them differently and to individuals whose organized financial investment is actually less, according to the Federal Get, than the average mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Allow me broaden on among my observations.


My price quote based upon the financiers' permit applications filed 2 years after the first investment-- these are the solid ones that continue to be and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not provide the kind of data that we can use on this.


For every $100 of increased international investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a much a lot more shaky statistical base, the first applications of potential immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Allow us approve that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I eagerly anticipate your remarks and inquiries. [The ready statement of David North appears as 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 group.




Divine worked as Chief Counsel of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Providers from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and then Acting Replacement Supervisor. He website has functioned extensively with the EB-5 program in private method. He was elected, as I comprehend, vice head of state of the Association to Spend in USA, the nationwide market organization of regional centers.


Divine, we are happy to have you right here. Please go on, 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. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At a lot of, if all 10,000 slots were utilized, it would be 1 percent of the immigration each year to the USA. It is not near that yet, yet it is expanding and getting toward that. Especially as USCIS, the company that looks after the program, has actually been making the policies clearer and the procedures a lot more logical and clear for the people that are arranging financial investments and for the capitalists that are investing, even more people have agreed and able to put effort and cash right into the procedure to find good jobs and develop them, and after that much more investors have actually been prepared to spend their money and take the risk and use the cash to develop the jobs that is the factor of the program.

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These tasks do not wait around forever, and USCIS recognizes that and are trying to speed up the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are relaxing their examination, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to deny applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was mentioned


The regional facility part of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations expense that was passed in 1992, and considering that then that program has been extended 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 date of expiration in September.


The process takes a great while to develop a project and after that to obtain the investors approved. And they do not want their cash streaming through till they have been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is currently preventing the advancement of jobs.

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I would certainly like to make clear that the Regional Center Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the normal EB-5 law that belongs to the code. It just is a truth that a lot of the regional facilities that are merging financial investments have established those in places of high joblessness or in country locations where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are enabled, and that makes feeling.