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The program is put in a really odd and non-helpful administrative area for the excitement of international investment in the United States. Second, its range is all incorrect. We are distributing excessive for as well small of a financial investment. Further, raising venture funding fifty percent a million dollars a tranche is, to say the least, inefficient.


The regional facilities, with their half-million systems, basically damaged the much more 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 regarding creating organization entities, not easy investments. It should have to do with producing real work, not clarify calculations regarding the indirect development of work, which is now component of the legislation.


Perhaps that is among the reasons it has actually fallen short time after time to reach the legal goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is too full of intermediaries, both public and exclusive. The program has more than its share of detractions, which I will certainly get involved in later if any person is interested.


This is a firm that likes to claim yes to applicants, however as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have a lot more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that no one has actually really spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of interior rejections in this program and completely factor

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people who might not get them otherwise and to individuals whose organized financial investment is in fact much less, according to the Federal Book, than the ordinary mean internet worth of all American family members in 2007. Allow me broaden on one of my observations.


My quote based on the investors' eco-friendly card 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 concerning $191 million validated-- that is my quote. USCIS does not supply the sort of data that we might utilize on this.


For every $100 of increased international investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a far more shaky analytical base, the first applications of potential immigrant investors, USCIS is informing journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I eagerly anticipate your comments and concerns. [The ready declaration of David North appears as 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 company's immigration practice group.




Divine offered as Chief Advice of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Services from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and after that Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has actually functioned extensively with the EB-5 program here secretive method. He was chosen, as I comprehend, vice head of state of the Association to Invest in United States, the nationwide sector association of regional.


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


At the majority of, if all 10,000 slots were utilized, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration each year to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and obtaining toward that. Especially as USCIS, the company that supervises the program, has actually been making the guidelines more clear and the processes more logical and clear for the people who are arranging investments and for the financiers that are investing, more people have wanted and able to place initiative and cash into the process to discover good jobs and create them, and afterwards much more investors have been ready to spend their cash and take the danger and make use of the cash to produce the tasks that is the factor of the program.

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These tasks do not wait about permanently, and USCIS recognizes that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed up the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are unwinding their examination, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to deny applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was mentioned


The regional facility part of the program is not. It is component of an appropriations expense that was enacted in 1992, and ever since that program has been expanded five 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 date of expiry in September.


The process takes an excellent while to develop a project and after that to obtain the financiers approved. And they do not desire their cash streaming via until they have actually been authorized. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is already preventing the development of jobs.

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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 routine EB-5 legislation that belongs to the code. It simply is a fact that a lot of the local facilities that are pooling investments have set those in locations of high unemployment or in rural areas where half- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.