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limit TEA formation in California. The majority of TEAs
would no longer qualify under this hybrid 12-tract approach.
Another eleventh-hour dagger was the reserved visas. As
others have discussed, the 2,000 reserved visas for each of the
Priority Urban Investment Area, rural, and non-TEA groups
places the more prevalent Special Investment Zone TEA in a
second-class status, fighting over the 4,000 leftover visas. With
visa waiting periods increasing, it could discourage investment
in these Special Investment Zone TEAs.
The definition of an MSA is that a person can change jobs
without changing their place of residence. By this definition,
any job within an MSA should be able to be filled by any
resident of a high unemployment area within that MSA. For
example, a hotel project in an inner city is likely to bring in
construction workers and permanent staff from other parts
of the city and neighboring communities within the MSA. If
there is not enough unemployment in a project’s commuting
area, then it will not be plausible to designate a TEA. There
should definitely be limits on TEA formation to prevent
blatant attempts at gerrymandering, but allowing unlimited
configurations within an MSA should be permissible. All
gerrymandering concerns can be fully addressed by limiting
the number of combined areas to 12, or to some other
12
agreed-upon number when a TEA crosses MSA boundaries.
The TEA definition should not automatically exclude
census tracts that encompass special land use census tracts or
cover bodies of water since these can be legitimate connectors.
However, a water-based tract with no or limited land mass and
no population, such as the Pacific Ocean census tracts off the
California coast, should never be allowed in any TEA configuration. Water-based tracts should only be allowed when there is a
bridge, tunnel, or causeway connection.
Geographic Subdivisions
USCIS EB-5 regulations provide that a state government
may designate a geographic or political subdivision within its
boundaries as a targeted employment area based on high unemployment. Consistent with the regulations, USCIS defers to state
determinations of the appropriate boundaries of a geographic or
political subdivision that constitutes the targeted employment
area. However, subdivisions like those in the Grassley-Leahy
bill only identify census tracts and not block groups, which are
defined by the Census Bureau as statistical divisions of census
tracts, and are the smallest geographic configuration for which
official employment and unemployment data is available.
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