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The program is placed in an extremely odd and non-helpful governmental location for the excitement of international financial investment in the United States. We are providing away as well much for too tiny of an investment.

The regional centers, with their half-million systems, basically undercut the more reasonable million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them at all, as they carry out in Australia, need to be concerning creating business entities, not passive financial investments. It should have to do with developing genuine jobs, not clarify estimations concerning the indirect development of tasks, which is now component of the legislation.


Maybe that is one of the reasons it has failed time after time to get to the legal objective of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is as well full of middlemen, both public and exclusive. The program has even more than its share of detractions, which I will certainly obtain right into later on if anybody is interested.


This is an agency that loves to claim yes to candidates, however as the table in my statement shows, USCIS police officers have far more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that nobody has actually truly discussed a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of inner rejections in this program and for great reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people who could not obtain them otherwise and to people whose planned investment is actually less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Let me increase on one of my observations.


My price quote based on the financiers' permit applications submitted 2 years after the initial investment-- these are the solid ones that stay and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million validated-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not offer the sort of data that we can utilize on this.


So for each $100 of raised foreign investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a a lot more shaky analytical base, the first applications of would-be immigrant investors, USCIS is telling journalists that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year was concerning $1.2 billion. Allow us approve that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I look ahead to your remarks and questions. [The prepared statement of David North looks like an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the company's immigration method group.

Divine functioned as Principal Guidance of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Providers from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Director, and after that Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has functioned extensively with the EB-5 program in personal practice. He was chosen, as I understand, vice president of the Organization to Invest in U.S.A., the national industry organization of local centers.


Divine, we are happy 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 HEAD OF STATE, PURCHASE THE U.S.A. (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 made use of, it would certainly be 1 percent of the migration each year to the USA. It is not near that yet, yet it is expanding and getting toward that. Specifically as USCIS, the company that supervises the program, has been making the rules more clear and the procedures extra reasonable and clear for the individuals that are arranging financial investments and for the financiers that are investing, more individuals have actually agreed and able to place effort and money into the process to find good projects and create them, and then extra investors have wanted to spend their money and take the threat and use the cash to develop the jobs that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not linger permanently, and USCIS understands that and are attempting to speed the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are unwinding their analysis, and, as a matter of fact, they are prepared to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was pointed out

The local center component of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations expense that was enacted in 1992, and since then that program has been expanded 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The process takes a good while to develop a project and afterwards to obtain the capitalists authorized. And they do not desire their cash flowing with up until they have actually been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is already preventing the growth of projects.

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I want to make clear 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 EB5 Regional Center Program law that is part of the code. It simply is a reality that the majority of the regional facilities that are merging investments have actually set those in areas of high unemployment or in country locations where half- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.