Pass One Immigration Bill Now - Forget About It for Decades

Congress has not enacted comprehensive immigration legislation in thirty-five years. The Immigration Act of 1990 raised annual caps from 270,000 to 675,000, created the H-1B specialty-occupation visa, and launched the Diversity Visa Lottery. Two subsequent reform packages, in 2007 and 2013, died in committee. The statutory framework written under George H.W. Bush has produced 32 million net new foreign-born residents, doubled the foreign-born share from 7.9% to 15.8%, and triggered the largest sustained metropolitan housing-cost compression in U.S. history.

America's Immigration Cycle

The 1924 Act cut immigration sharply. For four decades, levels stayed low, the pre-1924 wave assimilated, the middle class expanded, and immigration largely disappeared as a political issue. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act replaced the national-origins quota system with a family-reunification framework. The 1990 Act raised annual caps from 270,000 to 675,000 and created the H-1B program, opening the largest wave of immigration in American history.

Congress has not enacted comprehensive immigration legislation since 1990. Reform packages failed in 2007 and 2013. The 1990 Act has continued admitting roughly one million people per year for thirty-five years, with an additional estimated two to three million annual illegal entries.

What a New Immigration Act Should Do

Congress should pass a single comprehensive immigration statute that resets the system for the next generation and leave it untouched for decades, following the 1924 model.

Core Provisions

Geographic Focus: Europe and the Americas

Admissions would be restricted to regions of cultural and institutional proximity to the United States:

• Europe - Shared legal, institutional, and democratic traditions
• The Americas - Geographic adjacency and hemispheric integration through two centuries of trade and migration

Primary Pathways

The H-1B specialty-occupation visa, created by the 1990 Act, served genuine functions in its first decade. American universities had been unable to retain a meaningful share of their foreign doctoral graduates in engineering, computer science, and the physical sciences. The early H-1B brought scarce talent into defense laboratories, semiconductor design, and academic research. Companies that built the foundational technologies of the 1990s and early 2000s recruited engineers through the program who could not have legally remained in the country otherwise. The program produced real economic and scientific output during that period.

The program's purpose has since collapsed. The 2024 USCIS data show 64% of approvals at entry-level wage tiers, with a median certified wage of approximately $108,000, below the median wage for U.S. software engineers. The H-1B now functions as a wage-suppression instrument for routine corporate IT staffing rather than a pipeline for irreplaceable expertise. A reset bill would limit work-based admissions to two narrow categories:

• Family Unification - Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. No extended-family chain migration.
• Exceptional Skills - Individuals whose work cannot be performed by any of the 330 million people already in the country. Nobel laureates, leading researchers, founders with established records. The threshold should be measured in thousands per year, not hundreds of thousands.

The Diversity Visa lottery would be eliminated. The H-1B program would be reduced to a small exceptional-skills carve-out and otherwise wound down.

What This Achieves

Housing Becomes Affordable Again

Immigration affects housing through direct demand. MIT economist Albert Saiz quantified the relationship in metro-area data: a one-percentage-point increase in a city's population from immigration raises rents by approximately one percent.^[1] Compounded annually for three decades, the effect is large.

# New York City Since the 1990 Immigration Act

New York added one million foreign-born residents in the 34 years following the 1990 Act. Median rent rose 620%, from $486 to $3,500. The median home price rose 336%, from $180,000 to $785,000.^[3] The same pattern shows up in the Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Boston metro areas, all of which absorbed disproportionate shares of the post-1990 flow. A 50% reduction in annual admissions would slow household-formation growth by approximately the same proportion, allowing housing supply to begin catching up to demand for the first time since the early 1980s.

Cost of Living Stabilizes

Wage suppression is one half of the affordability problem. Cost growth is the other half. Adding roughly one million new residents per year increases demand for housing, groceries, healthcare, childcare, and municipal services. Each of those markets has constrained short-run supply, and each responds to sustained demand growth with higher prices.

Households in high-immigration metropolitan areas experience the compounded effect: their wages have not risen, and the basic cost of staying in place has risen substantially. A worker treading water in 1990 is slipping backwards in 2025. The framing of immigration's effect as "harming workers" understates the problem. Existing residents pay the cost regardless of whether they are wage-earners, retirees, or homeowners. Rent, taxes, insurance, and grocery bills move together.

Labor Markets Tighten

Restricted labor supply forces employers to compete for workers. After the 1924 Act, real wages for production workers rose continuously for four decades. The current labor market shows the opposite pattern: roughly one million new working-age arrivals each year, concentrated in construction, hospitality, transportation, and routine professional services.

The Princeton Industrial Relations Section's study of the 1920s border closure isolated the wage effect by county exposure. Counties with the largest pre-1924 immigrant labor presence showed the largest post-1924 wage gains.^[2] The mechanism is straightforward labor economics: a fixed demand curve meeting a reduced supply curve raises marginal wages.

Assimilation Has Time to Happen

The 14 million immigrants present in 1920 had four decades to integrate without competing waves. Their children attended American schools without parallel ethnic-language enclaves expanding around them. By 1970, the descendants of Italian, Polish, Jewish, Greek, and Irish arrivals had merged into a common American identity.

Foreign-language daily newspapers in New York fell from 138 in 1910 to fewer than 40 by 1960. Public schools moved through second-generation children with English-only instruction at scale, without needing to allocate substantial resources to translation, ESL programs, or parallel-track instruction. A reduction in annual admissions would restore the conditions under which assimilation is the default demographic outcome rather than an active policy challenge.

Who Immigration Policy Should Serve

The standard for evaluating any immigration statute is whether it improves outcomes for the people already living in the country. Current policy fails that test on wages, on housing, on services, and on assimilation. It serves employers seeking lower labor costs and political constituencies built on demographic change. It does not serve the existing population.

A reset bill would invert that incentive structure: lower numerical caps, cultural-proximity focus, and an exceptional-skills carve-out for the genuinely irreplaceable. It is the same instrument that worked from 1924 to 1965, recalibrated to a country of 335 million.

A Durable Statute, Then a Generation of Quiet

The 1924 Act was politically contested before passage and politically settled afterward. Once admissions fell, the issue largely left federal politics. No major immigration legislation passed between 1924 and 1965 because none was needed. The country had absorbed its existing immigrant population, wages were rising, and housing was affordable.

A comprehensive reset of admissions levels, eligibility regions, and category structure would produce the same political quiet that followed 1924. The country has more urgent and more complex problems than its annual quota schedule. The argument for one durable statute is that it removes immigration from the year-by-year political agenda for a generation, which is the condition under which the postwar middle class actually formed.

Sources

1. IZA World of Labor, "How Immigration Affects Housing Costs" - Saiz et al. on rent-to-population elasticity
2. Princeton Economics, "The Effects of Immigration on the Economy: Lessons from the 1920s Border Closure" - County-level wage effects after 1924
3. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2023 - New York foreign-born and housing data
4. Harvard JCHS, "The Role of the Recent Immigrant Surge in Housing Costs," 2024 - Recent surge effect on rental markets
5. DHS, Office of Immigration Statistics - Annual admissions data
6. USCIS, H-1B Employer Data Hub, 2024 - H-1B wage tier distribution