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The program is placed in an extremely weird and non-helpful bureaucratic area for the stimulation of global financial investment in the United States. Second, its range is all wrong. We are distributing excessive for also small of an investment. Additionally, raising equity capital fifty percent a million bucks a tranche is, to claim the least, inefficient.


The local centers, with their half-million schemes, basically undercut the extra sensible million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they carry out in Australia, need to have to do with producing service entities, not passive financial investments. It should have to do with producing genuine tasks, not elaborate computations regarding the indirect development of work, which is currently part of the regulation.


Perhaps that is among the reasons it has actually failed 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 also filled up with intermediaries, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of detractions, which I will enter into later on if anybody is interested.


This is a company that enjoys to claim yes to applicants, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS officers have far more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that no one has actually really discussed a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of interior rejections in this program and permanently reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals who can not get them otherwise and to individuals whose scheduled financial investment is actually less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the average mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Allow me increase on among my monitorings.


My quote based upon the investors' eco-friendly card applications filed 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the solid ones that stay and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not supply the kind of information that we can make use of on this.


So for every single $100 of boosted international investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a a lot more wobbly analytical base, the initial applications of would-be immigrant capitalists, USCIS is telling journalists that the level of financial investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thanks for paying attention to me. I expect your remarks and inquiries. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like a submission for the document.] 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 technique group.




Divine functioned as Principal Guidance of the United States Citizenship and Migration Services from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and afterwards Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has actually worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program in exclusive practice. He was elected, as I comprehend, vice head of state of the Organization to Spend in United States, the nationwide industry association of regional.


STATEMENT 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, Senator Grassley, and others.


At many, if all 10,000 slots were utilized, it would be 1 percent of the migration each year to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is expanding and obtaining towards that. Specifically as USCIS, the firm that supervises the program, has actually been making the rules more clear and the procedures much more rational and clear for the people that are arranging financial investments and for the financiers who are spending, even more individuals have agreed and able to put effort and cash right into the process to discover good tasks and create them, and then extra capitalists have actually wanted to spend their cash and take the threat and utilize the cash to develop the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These jobs do not wait about permanently, and USCIS comprehends that and are attempting to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are unwinding their analysis, and, in reality, they prepare 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 here has actually been extended five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be irreversible, and it needs to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The process takes a great while to develop a job and after that to get the financiers approved. And they do not desire their cash flowing via up until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is currently preventing the growth of projects.

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I wish to clarify that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 legislation that becomes part of the code. It just is a truth that many of the local facilities that are merging financial investments have actually set those in places of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.