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First, the program is positioned in an extremely odd and non-helpful administrative location for the excitement of worldwide financial investment in the United States. Second, its range is all wrong. We are distributing too much for also little of a financial investment. Even more, elevating venture funding fifty percent a million dollars a tranche is, to state the least, inefficient.

The regional facilities, with their half-million systems, basically damaged the extra practical million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in any way, as they perform in Australia, must be about creating company entities, not passive investments. It must be regarding producing real jobs, not clarify estimations regarding the indirect development of work, which is currently component of the regulation.


Maybe that is among the reasons that it has actually stopped working time after time to reach the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally awkward, and the program is as well loaded with middlemen, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will certainly get involved in later on if anybody is interested.


This is a firm that loves to state yes to candidates, however as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS policemans have a lot more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that no one has actually really discussed much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of inner denials in this program and permanently factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals that can not obtain them any kind of various other way and to individuals whose scheduled investment is really less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the typical mean web well worth of all American households in 2007. Let me broaden on one of my observations.


My estimate based upon the investors' permit applications submitted 2 years after the initial financial investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not offer the kind of data that we could use on this.


For every $100 of raised foreign financial investment that year, the EB program added one penny. Under a far more wobbly analytical base, the initial applications of prospective immigrant investors, USCIS is informing journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year was regarding $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I look ahead to your comments and questions. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like a submission for the document.] 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 company's immigration practice group.

Divine acted as Principal Advise of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 till 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 comprehend, vice president of the Association to Spend in U.S.A., the national sector association of local centers.


Divine, we are pleased to have you right here. Please proceed, sir. DECLARATION OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, ATTORNEY, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE HEAD OF STATE, INVEST IN THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 slots were made use of, it would be 1 percent of the migration annually to the USA. It is not near that yet, but it is expanding and obtaining toward that. Specifically as USCIS, the company that supervises the program, has actually been making the guidelines clearer and the procedures much more sensible and clear for individuals that are arranging investments and for the capitalists who are investing, even more individuals have wanted and able to place initiative and money right into the procedure to find excellent jobs and develop them, and after that a lot more investors have been eager to spend their cash and take the threat and make use of the cash to develop the work that is the point of the program.

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These tasks do not linger forever, and USCIS comprehends that and are attempting to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are unwinding their analysis, and, as a matter of fact, they are ready to reject applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was pointed out

The regional facility part of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations costs that was established in 1992, and ever since that program has actually been prolonged 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it needs to be done currently and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The process takes an excellent while to function up a task and afterwards to obtain the capitalists accepted. And they do not want their cash moving with till they have actually been authorized. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is already discouraging the advancement of projects.

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I want to make clear that the Regional Facility Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a function of the normal EB-5 law that belongs to the code. It simply is a reality that the majority of the regional facilities that are merging financial investments have actually established those in places of high joblessness or in rural locations more info where half- million-dollar financial investments are allowed, which makes good sense.