The Assimilation act

All Americans should be alarmed by the scale and character of post-1965 legal mass immigration. After two generations of closed borders and cultural cohesion which helped to turn America into the world’s leading superpower, our borders were opened again in 1965 by the Hart-Celler Act. Since then, our country has become progressively more diverse and therefore less American. While massive illegal immigration has imposed social and economic costs, deliberate, post-1965 legal mass immigration has played a significant role in the rapid demographic dispossession of Americans, wage stagnation for native workers, fiscal strain on our welfare programs, and a cultural erosion of the American way of life. We need a correction.

Tennessee representative Andy Ogles’ newly introduced ASSIMILATION Act (formally the "American System for Sustainable Immigration and Mass Immigration Limitations Achieved Through Imposing Oversight Nationally Act") is, in our opinion, this substantive and long-overdue corrective... the bill explicitly targets the Hart-Celler framework (the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments) that shifted U.S. policy away from national-origins preservation and prioritized chain migration and engineered diversity...

The legislation’s structure and provisions align closely with core America First priorities: it ends exponential family-chain migration, eliminates the anti-assimilation diversity lottery, imposes a national-interest gate that includes cultural considerations, and raises concrete assimilation and self-sufficiency bars. The Assimilation Act represents the strongest congressional attempt in generations to halt mass immigration and to replace it with an immigration system focused upon quality and cultural compatibility...

For more context, between 1921, when the Emergency Quota Act was introduced to curtail mass immigration from Europe, and 1965, when the Hart-Celler Act was passed, legal immigration to the United States averaged 213,000 individuals per year - a significant decrease from the 850,000 to 2.1 million that had arrived every year since the 1890s. As a result of this 44-years of restriction, the foreign-born population of the United States plummeted from nearly 14% in 1920 to about 5.4% by 1960. The overall population of immigrants during that time declined from 14 million in 1920 to 9.7 million in 1960. America became substantially more American through a half-century of closed borders and stringent integration of the descendants of the early 20th century immigrants. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act erased that progress...

The bill adds a new subsection to 8 U.S.C. 1101 requiring that "An alien’s admission, classification, employment, or proposed endeavor shall be deemed to be in the national interest only if such alien establishes, by a preponderance of objective evidence, that such admission, classification, employment, or proposed endeavor is expected to produce a material prospective public benefit for the United States."...

Family-Sponsored Immigration Reform (Section 201)

This section dramatically narrows chain migration...

This is perhaps the most important section of the bill. Currently, family-based immigration is responsible for 65% to 78% of immigrant admissions to the United States every year. Each year more than 750,000 immigrants are admitted to this country on the basis of family ties and more than 75% of those admissions are the family members of other immigrants, not of Americans. Furthermore, current immigrants can sponsor adult children, the parents, their siblings, and those individuals can then in turn sponsor their own family members. It is a massive 'chain' that pulls entire Pakistani, Mexican, Somali, and other third world villages and towns into the United States to resettle en masse. The Assimilation Act puts an end to this...

The bill strikes section 203(c) of the INA (the diversity visa lottery) entirely...

Employment-Based Immigration and H-1B Reforms (Sections 203–204)

Employment-based immigration in the Assimilation Act would be capped at 140,000 visas annually and subjected to a rigorous national-interest certification...

The legislation permanently strengthens the public-charge rules so that legal immigrants who would need or who in fact use the welfare state would be removed from the country or never admitted in the first place. The legislation mandates nationwide E-Verify to make illegal aliens largely unemployable. It adds penalties for visa overstays and unlawful presence..