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The program is put in an extremely weird and non-helpful governmental location for the excitement of international investment in the United States. We are offering away too much for as well tiny of an investment.


The regional centers, with their half-million schemes, basically undercut the more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they carry out in Australia, should have to do with producing business entities, not easy investments. It ought to be about creating actual work, not elaborate calculations about the indirect creation of work, which is currently part of the legislation.


Possibly that is just one of the reasons why it has stopped working year after year to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is inherently awkward, and the program is too loaded with intermediaries, both public and exclusive. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will certainly get involved in later on if anybody is interested.


This is an agency that likes to say yes to candidates, yet as the table in my statement shows, USCIS officers have far more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has truly spoken about 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 that could not get them any kind of other way and to people whose organized financial investment is really less, according to the Federal Book, than the average mean total assets of all American households in 2007. Let me broaden on one of my observations.


My estimate based on the capitalists' environment-friendly card applications submitted 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 validated-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not provide the sort of data that we can make use of on this.


For every $100 of raised international financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a far more shaky statistical base, the initial applications of prospective immigrant investors, USCIS is informing 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 anticipate your comments and concerns. [The ready statement of David North looks like an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor 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 Solutions from July 2004 till November 2006, the try this year in which he was Acting Director, and afterwards Performing Replacement Director. He has functioned extensively with the EB-5 program in exclusive practice. He was chosen, as I recognize, vice president of the Association to Purchase USA, the national industry organization of local facilities.


Divine, we are pleased to have you here. Please go ahead, 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. Thanks for having me.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 ports were made use of, it would be 1 percent of the immigration annually to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is expanding and obtaining toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the company that manages the program, has been making the rules more clear and the procedures extra sensible and clear for individuals who are organizing financial investments and for the investors who are investing, more people have actually agreed and able to place initiative this post and money right into the procedure to discover excellent jobs and establish them, and after that more investors have actually been willing to spend their money and take the danger and utilize the money to develop the work that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not wait around permanently, and USCIS comprehends that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are relaxing their scrutiny, and, as a matter of fact, they are ready to deny applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was stated


The local center part of the program is not. It is component of an appropriations expense that was passed in 1992, and since then that program has been extended 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The process takes a great while to develop a project and after that to get the financiers authorized. And they do not want their cash flowing via till they have been authorized. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is already dissuading the growth of jobs.

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I want to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is my review here not the like the half-million-dollar point. The idea of half a million or a million is a function of the regular EB-5 legislation that becomes part of the code. It simply is a reality that the majority of the local centers that are merging financial investments have actually set those instead of high unemployment or in rural areas where half- million-dollar investments are allowed, which makes good sense.