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The program is put in a very odd and non-helpful governmental location for the excitement of global investment in the United States. We are offering away too much for also small of a financial investment.


The regional centers, with their half-million systems, basically damaged the much more reasonable 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 have to do with creating company entities, not passive investments. It ought to have to do with creating real jobs, not elaborate calculations about the indirect creation of jobs, which is currently component of the regulations.


Perhaps that is just one of the reasons that it has stopped working year after year to get to the legal goal of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is also loaded with intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has greater than its share of detractions, which I will certainly enter into later on if anyone is interested.


This is a firm that likes to state yes to candidates, but as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS policemans have much extra difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that no one has actually truly spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of internal denials in this program and completely factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals who could not get them any kind of other method and to individuals whose planned financial investment is actually much less, according to the Federal Get, than the average mean internet worth of all American family members in 2007. Let me expand on among my monitorings.


My price quote based upon the financiers' permit applications submitted 2 years after the first investment-- these are the strong ones that continue to be and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million verified-- that is my quote. USCIS does not provide the type of data that we might make use of on this.


So for every $100 of raised foreign financial investment that year, the EB program added one dime. Under a a lot more shaky statistical base, the initial applications of prospective immigrant investors, 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 expect your remarks and concerns. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like a submission for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the company's immigration technique team.




Divine worked as Chief Counsel of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in find out here now which he was Performing Supervisor, and then Performing Replacement Director. He has worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive practice. He was chosen, as I understand, vice president of the Organization to Buy find more info U.S.A., the nationwide sector organization of regional centers.


Divine, we are thrilled to have you below. Please proceed, sir. STATEMENT 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, Senator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At most, if all 10,000 slots were used, it would be 1 percent of the immigration annually to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is expanding and obtaining toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the agency that supervises the program, has actually been making the policies clearer and the processes extra rational and clear for the people who are organizing investments and for the financiers that are investing, more individuals have actually been willing and able to put effort and money right into the process to locate great jobs and establish them, and afterwards a lot more financiers have been ready to spend their money and take the risk and use the cash to produce the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These projects do not linger permanently, and USCIS comprehends that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, actually, they prepare to reject applications that are not certifying. And they do so, visit this web-site as was pointed out


The local center component of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations bill that was passed in 1992, and given that then that program has actually been expanded 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be irreversible, and it needs to be done now and not nearer to the day of expiry in September.


The procedure takes an excellent while to function up a task and then to get the investors authorized. And they do not want their money flowing via till they have actually been accepted. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently inhibiting the growth of projects.

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I would love to make clear that the Regional Center Program is not the very 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 belongs to the code. It just is a fact that most of the regional facilities that are merging financial investments have established those in locations of high joblessness or in country areas where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are enabled, and that makes good sense.