Research, analysis, and commentary on immigration policy and cultural integration.
The Supreme Court reaffirmed birthright citizenship 6-3 on June 30, 2026, ending the Trump Administration's Executive Action from January 2025. There are several things the administration and Congress can do, to reduce the impacts of birthright citizenship in the future.
In 1960, one factory paycheck supported a family and bought a house. Today two incomes are the baseline. The American worker now competes in a labor pool that grew from 70 million to 168 million, and nearly one in five workers was born abroad.
In 1924, Congress cut permanent immigration by about 80% and held it there for 41 years, and the middle class expanded. The 1965 and 1990 Acts reversed that cut. A modern law would cut green cards to about 250,000 a year and fix that number in law.
Housing supply is fixed and slow to grow. Since 1990 the United States added 32 million immigrants, about 80% into the same 20 metros where housing is already tightest. That demand shock is a central reason homeownership for Americans under 35 has fallen to about 37%.
On May 21, the Trump administration ended a workaround that millions of foreign workers had used to get green cards without leaving the United States. People on temporary visas - H-1B workers, students, religious workers, fiancés - now have to fly home and apply at a U.S. embassy abroad.
U.S. net migration fell from 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025, and is projected at 321,000 to 570,000 for 2026. That is roughly 80% below the peak, and the executive branch did all of it.
British voters chose to leave the European Union in 2016 largely to reduce immigration. Years later, immigration has never been reduced.
Foreign-born workers supplied 10.3 million of the 18.8 million people added to the American labor force since 2005. Over the same years the share of young households owning a home fell below where it stood in 1994.
The H-1B program brings about 400,000 foreign professionals a year into U.S. jobs at below-median wages. The shortage it claims to fix no longer exists - and AI programming tools are shrinking the demand even further.
Foreign buyers purchase about 100,000 existing U.S. homes a year - roughly 2.7 million over the past 15 years - and foreign owners hold about 45.8M acres of American farmland. No federal law bars a single one of those purchases.
The 1890-1924 wave packed the Lower East Side to over 334,000 people per square mile, filled the tenements with overcrowding and disease, and held unskilled wages flat for fifteen years. The 1924 Act cut immigration roughly 80%, and the next four decades produced rising wages, easing housing pressure, and full assimilation of the immigrants already here.
When we hear about '1 million immigrants per year,' we forget that the more important number is immigrant stock - foreign-born plus their US-born children.
The H-1B visa was meant for irreplaceable talent. By the Homeland Security Department's own count, 83% of new H-1B jobs are filed at wages below the local median, and 70% of approvals go to one country.
Since 1990 the US added 32 million foreign-born residents, and about 64% of them settled in just 20 metros. In those metros a home now costs five to nine times a family's yearly income. In the metros that took in the fewest, it still costs about three.
Congress has not passed comprehensive immigration legislation since 1990. Annual admissions have run above one million for thirty-five years, and the foreign-born share has doubled from 7.9% to 15.8%.