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First, the program is placed in an extremely weird and non-helpful administrative location for the excitement of worldwide financial investment in the USA. Second, its scale is all wrong. We are handing out as well much for too small of an investment. Even more, raising endeavor resources fifty percent a million dollars a tranche is, to say the least, inefficient.


The regional facilities, with their half-million systems, basically undercut the more practical million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in all, as they carry out in Australia, need to be concerning producing business entities, not easy financial investments. It ought to be about developing real jobs, not specify estimations regarding the indirect production of tasks, which is now part of the regulation.


Possibly that is just one of the reasons it has stopped working every year to get to the legal goal 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 any person is interested.


This is an agency that loves to state yes to candidates, however as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS officers have a lot a lot more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has actually spoken about a lot. 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 individuals that can not obtain them otherwise and to individuals whose scheduled investment is actually less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the average mean net worth of all American families in 2007. Let me expand on one of my observations.


My estimate based upon the financiers' permit applications filed 2 years after the first financial investment-- these are the solid ones that remain and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had regarding $191 million confirmed-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not give the sort of data that we can utilize on this.


So for each $100 of enhanced foreign investment that year, the EB program added one penny. Under a far more wobbly analytical base, the preliminary applications of would-be immigrant capitalists, USCIS is telling reporters that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Allow us approve that.

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Thank you for paying attention to me. I look ahead to your comments and concerns. [The ready statement of David North looks like a submission for the document.] 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 company's immigration practice group.




Divine acted as Chief Counsel of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and then Performing Replacement Director. He has actually worked extensively with the EB-5 program in private technique. He was elected, as I recognize, vice president of the Association to Invest in U.S.A., the nationwide sector association of regional.


STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, INVEST IN THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others.


At a lot of, if all 10,000 ports were made use of, it would be 1 percent of the immigration every year to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is growing and getting towards that. Specifically as USCIS, the agency that manages the program, has been making the rules clearer and the processes much more sensible and clear click here for the people that are organizing financial investments and for the capitalists that are investing, even more people have actually agreed and able to place effort and cash right into the procedure to locate good projects and develop them, and afterwards much more investors have wanted to invest their money and take the risk and use the cash to create the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These jobs do not wait around forever, and USCIS understands that and are trying to speed up the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are relaxing their scrutiny, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to reject applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was pointed out


The local center part of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations expense that was enacted in 1992, and given that then that program has been extended 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The procedure takes a good while to work up a task and after that to obtain the investors accepted. And they do not desire their money flowing via till they have been approved. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is already discouraging the growth of jobs.

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I would such as to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is not the like the half-million-dollar point. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the regular EB-5 legislation that is part of the code. It simply is a fact that the majority of the regional facilities that are merging financial investments have set those instead of high unemployment or in country locations where half- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.