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The program is placed in a very strange and non-helpful governmental place for the stimulation of worldwide investment in the United States. We are providing away too much for too small of a financial investment.

The regional centers, with their half-million systems, basically undercut the a lot more sensible million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they do in Australia, ought to have to do with developing organization entities, not passive financial investments. It must have to do with developing genuine tasks, not specify computations concerning the indirect production of jobs, which is now part of the regulation.


Probably that is among the reasons that it has actually fallen short time after time to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is inherently clumsy, and the program is too loaded with intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has even more than its share of scandals, which I will enter into later if anybody is interested.


This is an agency that likes to state yes to applicants, but as the table in my statement reveals, USCIS officers have a lot more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that no one has truly discussed much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of interior denials in this program and forever reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals that might not get them any various other method and to people whose organized investment is really much less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American households in 2007. Let me broaden on among my observations.


My price quote based upon the investors' eco-friendly card applications filed 2 years after the initial investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had concerning $191 million verified-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not supply the sort of information that we might make use of on this.


So for every single $100 of increased foreign financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a much more unsteady analytical base, the initial applications of potential immigrant capitalists, USCIS is informing reporters that the level of 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 find out to me. I expect your comments and concerns. [The prepared statement of David North appears as an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. 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 migration practice group.

Divine functioned as Chief Advise of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and after that Acting Deputy Director. He has functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was elected, as I recognize, vice president of the Organization to Buy United States, the nationwide market association of local facilities.


Divine, we are delighted to have you here. Please go ahead, sir. DECLARATION OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, INVEST IN THE USA (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thank you for having me.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 ports were used, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration every year to the United States. It is not near that yet, however it is growing and getting toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the agency that supervises the program, has actually been making the guidelines clearer and the procedures a lot more sensible and clear for the individuals that are organizing investments and for the investors who are investing, more individuals have agreed and able to put initiative and cash into the procedure to locate excellent jobs and create them, and like it after that a lot more investors have actually wanted to spend their cash and take the threat and use the money to create the jobs that is the factor of the program.

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These jobs do not linger forever, and USCIS understands that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are relaxing their analysis, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to refute applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was pointed out

The regional facility component of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations costs that was passed in 1992, and ever since that program has actually been extended five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be irreversible, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The procedure takes an excellent while to work up a project and after that to get the investors approved. And they do not desire their cash moving with up until they have been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently dissuading the advancement of jobs.

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I want to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 law that belongs to the code. It just find out here now is a fact that most of the local centers that are merging investments have set those instead of high unemployment or in backwoods where half- million-dollar financial investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.