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The program is positioned in a very odd and non-helpful bureaucratic area for the excitement of international investment in the United States. Second, its scale is all wrong. We are distributing way too much for as well little of a financial investment. Additionally, raising equity capital fifty percent a million bucks a tranche is, to say the least, ineffective.


The regional facilities, with their half-million plans, essentially damaged the a lot more practical million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in all, as they do in Australia, should have to do with developing service entities, not passive investments. It should be about developing actual tasks, not specify computations concerning the indirect development of jobs, which is now part of the legislation.


Maybe that is one of the reasons that it has actually stopped working year after year to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is inherently clumsy, and the program is as well filled with middlemen, both public and private. The program has more than its share of detractions, which I will certainly get into later if any person is interested.


This is a company that enjoys to state yes to applicants, yet as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS officers have a lot more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has actually actually talked around much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of inner rejections in this program and permanently factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people that can not obtain them any kind of other method and to individuals whose organized financial investment is really less, according to the Federal Book, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Let me broaden on among my observations.


My quote based upon the financiers' environment-friendly card applications submitted 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had regarding $191 million validated-- that is my quote. USCIS does not give the sort of information that we could use on this.


For every $100 of boosted foreign investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a a lot more unsteady statistical base, the initial applications of potential immigrant capitalists, USCIS is informing journalists that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us approve that.

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Thanks for paying attention to me. I anticipate your remarks and questions. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's immigration practice group.




Divine functioned as Chief Counsel of the United States Citizenship and Migration Solutions from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and then Performing Replacement Supervisor. He has actually worked extensively with the EB-5 program in exclusive practice. He was elected, as I recognize, vice president of the Organization to Purchase USA, the nationwide industry organization of local facilities.


Divine, we are pleased to have you here. Please go on, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, BUY THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At a lot of, if all 10,000 ports were utilized, it would certainly be 1 percent of the migration every year to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is expanding and getting towards that. Specifically as USCIS, the agency that oversees the program, has been making the rules read more clearer and the processes extra logical and clear for the people who are arranging financial investments and for the investors who are spending, more people have actually been willing and able to place initiative and money into the process to find good jobs and create them, and after that much more capitalists have actually been prepared to invest their money and take the danger and make use of the money to develop the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These jobs do not wait about for life, and USCIS recognizes that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, actually, they are all set to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was stated


The regional facility part of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations bill that was established in 1992, and ever since that program has been expanded 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The process takes a great while to work up a task and after that to obtain the investors accepted. And they do not desire their money moving with till they have been authorized. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is already preventing the development of tasks.

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I want to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the exact same as the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the regular EB-5 law that is component of the code. It just is a reality that many of the regional centers that are pooling investments have set those in places of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are permitted, which makes good sense.