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Initially, the program is positioned in a really weird and non-helpful governmental location for the excitement of international financial investment in the USA. Second, its range is all wrong. We are handing out excessive for as well little of a financial investment. Even more, elevating financial backing fifty percent a million dollars a tranche is, to state the least, ineffective.


The regional facilities, with their half-million systems, essentially damaged the much more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they carry out in Australia, ought to have to do with creating company entities, not easy financial investments. It must have to do with developing real jobs, not clarify computations concerning the indirect development of tasks, which is currently part of the legislation.


Maybe that is just one of the reasons that it has actually stopped working year after year to reach the legal goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is too loaded with intermediaries, both public and exclusive. The program has greater than its share of detractions, which I will certainly get involved in later on if anyone is interested.


This is an agency that loves to claim yes to applicants, but as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS police officers have far more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that nobody has actually truly spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of interior rejections in this program and forever factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people who can not obtain them otherwise and to people whose planned financial investment is in fact less, according to the Federal Book, than the average mean internet well worth of all American households in 2007. Allow me increase on one of my monitorings.


My estimate based on the capitalists' permit applications filed 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the solid ones that continue to be and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million validated-- that is my quote. USCIS does not provide the type of data that we might make use of on this.


So for each $100 of increased international investment that year, the EB program contributed one cent. Under a a lot more unsteady statistical base, the initial applications of potential immigrant capitalists, USCIS is informing reporters that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thanks for paying attention to me. I expect your comments and questions. [The prepared statement of David North looks like an entry for the document.] 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 Advice of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and after that Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program in private method. He was elected, as I comprehend, helpful resources vice head of state of the Association to Invest in U.S.A., the national industry organization of regional.


Divine, we are thrilled to have you here. Please go in advance, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, ATTORNEY, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE HEAD OF STATE, BUY THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At most, if all 10,000 slots were used, it would be 1 percent of the immigration annually to the USA. It is not near that yet, but it is growing and getting toward that. Especially as USCIS, the agency that manages the program, has actually been making the guidelines more clear and the procedures much more reasonable and clear for the individuals that are arranging financial investments and for the capitalists that are spending, more people have actually wanted and able to place initiative and cash into the procedure to find excellent jobs and create them, and then extra capitalists have agreed to spend their cash and take the danger next and make use of 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 procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are relaxing their examination, and, as a matter of fact, they are prepared to reject applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was mentioned


The local facility component of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations costs that was enacted in 1992, and ever since that program has actually been expanded 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 day visit this site of expiry in September.


The process takes a great while to develop a project and afterwards to get the capitalists approved. And they do not desire their money streaming through until they have been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is already inhibiting the development of tasks.

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I want to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is not the same as the half-million-dollar thing. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the normal EB-5 law that becomes part of the code. It simply is a reality that the majority of the regional centers that are merging investments have established those instead of high unemployment or in rural locations where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are enabled, which makes good sense.