America’s Immigration Reform Plan: A Practical Path Forward

There is no shortage of proposed solutions to America’s immigration crisis. Every election cycle produces a new round of promises, every administration announces a new enforcement posture, and every Congress introduces bills that go nowhere. And yet, after four decades of debate, the system remains broken in ways that are structurally the same as they were in 1986, only worse, because the underlying conditions have grown more complex and the political incentives to actually solve the problem have calcified further.

This document is the second step in the Centercratic Party’s comprehensive immigration policy initiative. Part One, America’s Immigration Crisis: What Is Broken and Why It Matters, defined the full scope of the problem: its historical roots, its structural causes, and its current dimensions. It concluded by identifying six structural conditions that any serious reform effort must address. This document takes the next step. It presents the solutions.

The discipline of separating diagnosis from prescription is essential, because every failed immigration reform effort in the last forty years has skipped the diagnostic step and jumped straight to politics. The result is what we have today: a system that serves no one. That discipline was honored in Part One. It is honored here by ensuring that every solution proposed in this document is grounded in a specific structural failure documented in Part One, and that no solution is presented without the implementation architecture, the evidence base, and the measurement framework needed to evaluate whether it would actually work.

The framework used to develop these solutions is the six-stage policy cycle and the three disciplines of serious governance introduced in America’s Biggest Problems Keep Getting Worse (June 2, 2026).¹ In that framework, Part One completed Stage 1 (Problem Identification). This document carries that work through Stage 3 (Policy Formulation), with direct attention to Stage 4 (Policy Adoption), Stage 5 (Policy Implementation), and Stage 6 (Policy Evaluation). The three disciplines, which start with root causes rather than surface symptoms, let evidence lead rather than ideology, and prioritize by impact rather than political convenience, govern every recommendation that follows.

The solutions presented in this document are designed to be durable. The goal is not a reform that survives one administration or one congressional cycle. The goal is a structural overhaul of the American immigration system capable of managing the nation’s immigration needs for the next fifty to one hundred years. That means the framework must be built on evidence rather than politics, on institutions rather than executive orders, and on legal pathways that match the real economic and demographic demands of 21st-century America rather than the assumptions of 1990.

What follows is the prescription.

Part I: The Foundational Principle: Enforcement and Pathways Must Scale Together

The Core Structural Error of the Past Forty Years

Every major immigration reform effort since 1986 has shared a fundamental structural flaw: enforcement capacity has been expanded without a commensurate expansion of legal pathways or adjudication capacity. Part One documented this pattern in precise terms. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized approximately 4 million people but built a defective employer sanctions system that the General Accounting Office documented as largely unenforceable within four years of its passage.² The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act dramatically expanded enforcement authorities, mandatory detention, and grounds for deportation while freezing legal immigration levels at their 1990 caps.³ The result was structurally predictable: enforcement pressure increased, legal options did not expand, and the unauthorized population continued to grow.

The 1996 three- and ten-year bars on re-entry produced a particularly perverse outcome. Before 1996, many unauthorized migrants from Mexico engaged in circular migration, working in the United States seasonally and returning home to their families. The bars made this circular pattern too risky, because leaving the country meant being barred from legal re-entry for years. The rational response was to stop leaving. Researchers have documented that the 1996 bars effectively converted a circular migration pattern into a permanent settlement pattern, increasing the long-term unauthorized population precisely because the cost of departing had become too high.⁴

This history leads to the foundational principle of any durable reform framework: enforcement and legal pathways must be designed as a single integrated system and must scale together. Expanding enforcement without expanding pathways does not reduce the unauthorized population. It increases it.

Every specific recommendation in this document flows from this principle. The framework is not enforcement-first or pathways-first. It is both, together, designed as a coherent system with the same goal: a legal immigration system that is functional, fair, and capable of managing the nation’s actual immigration needs for the next fifty to one hundred years.

Part II: Six Structural Reform Tracks

The solutions presented here are organized into six structural reform tracks, each addressing one or more of the core structural failures identified in Part One. Each track specifies the problem it tackles, the structural solution proposed, the implementation architecture, the evidence base, and the measurement framework.

Track One: Modernize the Legal Immigration System

The Problem

The foundational architecture of the U.S. legal immigration system was last comprehensively updated in 1990, a year before the World Wide Web went online, eight years before Google was founded, and decades before the demographic and economic conditions of the 2020s could have been anticipated.⁵ The system provides three principal pathways, namely family-based immigration, employment-based immigration, and humanitarian protection, all of which are operating under structural constraints that make them inadequate to meet 21st-century demand.

Employment-based immigration is capped at approximately 140,000 visas annually, a number calibrated to the economic conditions of 1990. The per-country cap of 7 percent means that a worker from India applying in the EB-2 or EB-3 category faces a wait time extending beyond one hundred years. The Migration Policy Institute has documented that some workers in the employment-based green card queue are effectively scheduled to wait 223 years.⁶ This is not a backlog. It is a statutory impossibility that has been permitted to exist for more than three decades.

The USCIS administrative backlog for lawful immigration benefits has more than tripled over the last decade, from approximately 3.5 million cases to over 10 million cases pending as of early 2026.⁷ These are not unauthorized immigrants or asylum seekers. These are people who followed the rules, paid the fees, and submitted the documentation. The system cannot process their applications within a human career lifespan.

The Solution

Reform One: Establish a Demand-Responsive Legal Immigration Framework

The central structural reform to legal immigration is the replacement of fixed numerical caps with a demand-responsive framework that adjusts annually based on labor market data, demographic projections, and national security assessments. Canada’s Express Entry system, introduced in 2015, demonstrated that a points-based, labor-market-responsive immigration system can process skilled worker applications within six months, compared to the years or decades required by the American system.⁸ Australia’s General Skilled Migration program similarly uses a points-based ranking system that allows numerical allocations to track actual occupational demand.⁹

The proposed American framework would retain the three existing pathways (family-based, employment-based, and humanitarian) while making the following structural changes:

Employment-based immigration: Total annual employment-based visa allocations would be set through a biennial review conducted jointly by the Department of Labor, the Department of Homeland Security, and an independent Congressional Budget Office analysis of labor market conditions. Base allocations would be set no lower than 200,000 annually, with upward adjustments tied to documented labor shortfalls in critical sectors. The per-country cap of 7 percent would be eliminated and replaced with individual per-country allocations set through the biennial review process, calibrated to actual application volume and labor market need. A points-based ranking system, modeled on Canada’s Comprehensive Ranking System, would be used to prioritize employment-based applications on the basis of education, work experience, English language proficiency, age, and adaptability. The system would maintain a rolling pool of applicants ranked by score, with invitations to apply issued through regular rounds, allowing the system to respond dynamically to changing labor market conditions without requiring new legislation every time economic circumstances change.

Family-based immigration: Immediate relative immigration, covering spouses, children under 21, and parents of U.S. citizens, would remain numerically unlimited. Preference category family immigration would be restructured to reduce processing times for the highest-priority relationships, specifically spouses and minor children of lawful permanent residents, from the current multi-year waits to a target of eighteen months. Existing family preference backlogs, some of which extend to cases filed in the 1990s and early 2000s, would be addressed through a multi-year backlog reduction program with dedicated annual funding and a ten-year clearance target.

Diversity Visa program: The Diversity Visa lottery, which provides 50,000 annual visas to nationals of countries with historically low immigration to the United States, would be retained but reformed to incorporate a points-based skills assessment as a secondary selection criterion among lottery winners. This preserves the program’s geographic diversity function while improving the economic integration outcomes of its beneficiaries.

Reform Two: Eliminate the Legal Immigration Backlog on a Ten-Year Schedule

The USCIS administrative backlog of over 10 million pending cases represents a fundamental failure of the legal immigration system’s basic operational capacity. Clearing this backlog requires a sustained multi-year investment in USCIS staffing, technology infrastructure, and processing capacity. The proposed framework calls for a dedicated backlog reduction program structured around the following elements:

1. A ten-year clearance target for all pending cases, with annual benchmarks established and publicly reported

2. A USCIS fee structure reform that separates application fee revenue from operational funding, ensuring that USCIS does not face the perverse incentive of slowing processing to extend the fee revenue stream

3. A technology modernization initiative to replace paper-based processing systems with digitized, case-management systems capable of real-time tracking and automated workflows

4. Dedicated congressional appropriations for backlog reduction staffing, separate from USCIS’s baseline operating budget, for the duration of the ten-year program

The cost of this investment is measurable and has a documented return. The $1.2 trillion in projected federal revenue from the immigration surge of 2021–2026 demonstrates the fiscal value of a functional legal immigration system.¹⁰ A backlog that prevents workers from obtaining legal status delays that fiscal contribution and, in many cases, drives those workers to leave the United States for countries with more functional immigration systems. Canada, Australia, and Germany have all implemented points-based systems specifically because they recognized that the competition for skilled workers is global and that processing speed is itself a competitive advantage.¹¹

Track Two: Build a Functional Employer Verification System

The Problem

As Part One documented in detail, the employer sanctions system established by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was structurally defective from the moment of its enactment.² Employers were required only to review documents that appeared genuine on their face, without any obligation to verify their authenticity. The General Accounting Office documented within four years that this flaw had rendered employer sanctions largely unenforceable. The result was a workforce enforcement system that created the appearance of accountability without the substance.

The voluntary E-Verify system, introduced in 1996, represented a significant improvement in principle: an electronic database check against Social Security and DHS records that can verify work authorization in real time. However, as of 2026, only approximately 30 percent of new hires are run through E-Verify, leaving the demand side of unauthorized employment effectively unaddressed.¹²

Research on the effect of mandatory E-Verify mandates in states that have implemented them shows significant results. A 2016 study by economists Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny found that state-level mandatory E-Verify laws reduced the likely unauthorized immigrant population from Mexico and Central America by meaningful margins, with newly arrived immigrants most likely to seek unauthorized employment falling by nearly 50 percent in states with mandatory E-Verify laws.¹³ In five of seven states with universal E-Verify mandates, the unauthorized workforce was substantially lower than the projected counterfactual.¹⁴

The Solution

Reform Three: Mandatory National E-Verify with Robust Due Process Protections

The proposed framework calls for a phased implementation of mandatory national E-Verify for all employers, structured as follows:

1. Phase One (Year One through Year Two): Mandatory E-Verify for all federal contractors and subcontractors, employers with 500 or more employees, and agricultural employers in the H-2A visa program. Compliance infrastructure, employee training, and an enhanced error resolution system would be established during this phase.

2. Phase Two (Year Three through Year Four): Mandatory E-Verify extended to all employers with 50 or more employees. Continued investment in error resolution capacity and employer compliance support.

3. Phase Three (Year Five): Universal mandatory E-Verify for all employers of record in the United States.

Critical to the framework is the parallel development of a next-generation employment verification system that addresses E-Verify’s documented weaknesses. The current E-Verify system can verify that a document is consistent with government records, but it cannot authenticate identity. This vulnerability to identity fraud, where unauthorized workers use stolen Social Security numbers or other fraudulent documents, is E-Verify’s primary known weakness.¹⁵ The Migration Policy Institute’s research on next-generation verification systems has identified biometric identity authentication as the most promising path to closing this gap. The proposed framework therefore pairs universal mandatory E-Verify with a biometric identity authentication pilot program that would be tested in volunteer employer communities during Phase One and Phase Two, with the goal of replacing document-based verification with biometric-based verification by Year Eight of full implementation.

Mandatory E-Verify without parallel expansion of legal pathways would simply divert labor demand from legal employers to underground employment arrangements, driving wages down and working conditions below enforceable standards. This document’s recommendation for mandatory E-Verify is therefore explicitly conditioned on the simultaneous implementation of Track One’s legal pathway reforms. The two tracks are not alternatives. They are complements.

Due process protections in the mandatory E-Verify system are non-negotiable components of this framework. The proposed framework requires:

1. An employer obligation to provide any employee with a tentative non-confirmation a minimum of ten business days to contest the result before any adverse action is taken

2. A dedicated USCIS error resolution office with a 72-hour initial response target for contested cases

3. An independent appeals mechanism for employees whose E-Verify results are challenged, separate from the employer’s reporting chain

4. Annual public reporting on E-Verify error rates, broken down by worker national origin, to ensure that the system’s known disparate error patterns are monitored and corrected

Track Three: Rebuild the Immigration Court System

The Problem

Part One documented the immigration court collapse in precise terms. As of April 2026, the backlog stands at 3,267,302 active cases, with 2,322,467 individuals having already filed formal asylum applications and waiting for hearings or decisions.¹⁶ The average case has been pending for more than four years. In fiscal year 2024, there were 735 immigration judges, the highest number in a decade, but the Trump administration’s dismissal of approximately 100 judges in early 2025 and subsequent departures have reduced that number to approximately 685 as of mid-2025.¹⁷ A new hiring class of 42 judges was announced in March 2026, a number that represents a fraction of what is needed to clear the backlog on any reasonable timeline.

Only 29.6 percent of immigrants facing removal proceedings as of April 2026 had legal representation. Research consistently demonstrates that unrepresented individuals face substantially worse outcomes and create substantially greater court inefficiency than represented individuals, because unrepresented parties are less able to present their cases clearly, require more judicial time to manage, and are more likely to have cases continued for procedural deficiencies.¹⁶

The structural independence problem is equally significant. Immigration judges are not Article I or Article III judges. They are attorneys in the Department of Justice, supervised by an Attorney General who is a political appointee and who has the legal authority to issue binding precedent decisions that constrain how immigration judges apply the law.¹⁸ This structure compromises the integrity and independence of the adjudicatory process and has been criticized by the Harvard Law Review as producing a system that functions as “courts in name only.”¹⁸

The immigration court backlog is not primarily a product of excessive migration. It is a product of four decades of failure to fund the adjudication system in proportion to the enforcement system. As the Bipartisan Policy Center documented as early as 2018, adding 238 additional immigration judges would cost approximately $259 million (8.6 percent of a single year’s ICE custody operations budget) and would significantly reduce the backlog by 2030.¹⁹ The court system has not received that investment.

The Solution

Reform Four: Transform the Immigration Court into an Independent Article I Court

The most important structural reform to the immigration court system is the conversion of the Executive Office for Immigration Review from an agency of the Department of Justice into an independent Article I court, a court created by Congress with judges appointed to fixed terms, insulated from executive branch political pressure, and operating under the procedural standards and due process requirements that apply to other Article I courts. The Real Courts, Rule of Law Act, introduced in the House in March 2026, would accomplish this conversion.²⁰ The proposed framework endorses this approach as the foundational institutional reform from which all other court improvements follow.

An independent Article I immigration court would:

1. Establish immigration judges as judicial officers appointed through a merit-based selection process, serving fixed terms of ten years with reappointment subject to performance review

2. Remove the Attorney General’s authority to issue binding precedent decisions that override immigration judge rulings

3. Create a standardized case management system across all immigration courts nationally, replacing the current patchwork of local practices

4. Establish mandatory recusal standards and conflict-of-interest rules consistent with federal judicial ethics requirements

Reform Five: Eliminate the Backlog on a Five-Year Schedule

Converting the court to Article I status addresses the structural integrity problem. Eliminating the backlog requires a separate, sustained resource commitment. Based on research published by the Center for Migration Studies, eliminating the current backlog of more than 3 million cases over a five-year period would require expanding the immigration judiciary to approximately 1,500 immigration judges, supported by proportionate increases in support staff, hearing facilities, and case management infrastructure.²¹ The proposed framework calls for:

1. Congressional appropriation of funding sufficient to build the immigration judiciary to 1,500 judges over five years, with a hiring plan of approximately 160 additional judges per year

2. A proportionate increase in immigration court interpreter services, court administration staff, and technology infrastructure

3. A dedicated backlog reduction docket separate from the ongoing case management docket, staffed by judges specifically assigned to adjudicate the oldest pending cases on an expedited basis

4. A Legal Representation Initiative that expands access to legal representation for unrepresented respondents, with the goal of achieving 70 percent representation rates by Year Five

The financial case for this investment is straightforward. Detention costs for a single individual held in ICE detention average approximately $150 per day. Cases that could be adjudicated and resolved in months instead drag on for years, accumulating detention costs that far exceed the cost of the judicial infrastructure needed to resolve them. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimated in 2018 that adding 238 judges would save $823 million in detention costs while costing $259 million in new judicial salaries, a net return of $564 million.¹⁹ At the scale proposed here, the financial returns are proportionately larger.

Track Four: Reform the Humanitarian Protection System

The Problem

The American asylum system was designed in 1980 to process a relatively small number of individually persecuted people in a Cold War geopolitical context. As Part One documented, the world for which that system was designed no longer exists.²² Global displacement has exceeded 120 million people. The primary drivers of migration from Central and South America, namely gang violence, generalized poverty, climate-driven agricultural failure, and institutional corruption, do not fit neatly within the legal definition of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group that the 1980 Refugee Act established. The result is a system that is asked to apply a narrow legal standard to a massive and growing population whose circumstances are genuine but whose legal eligibility under the existing framework is frequently uncertain.

More than 50 percent of asylum claims filed at the border in recent years have been denied when adjudicated on the merits.²³ This does not mean those claims were fraudulent. It means the legal standard does not capture the actual circumstances that are driving migration. A system designed around that standard will continue to generate enormous backlogs and inconsistent outcomes until the standard is modernized.

The Solution

Reform Six: Modernize the Asylum and Humanitarian Protection Framework

The proposed framework calls for three parallel reforms to the humanitarian protection system:

Restructure the asylum eligibility standard. The legal definition of “refugee” under the 1980 Refugee Act would be updated to add a sixth protected ground, “serious harm caused by inability of home country government to provide basic protection from pervasive violence, environmental disaster, or systematic economic failure,” that captures the primary circumstances driving contemporary asylum claims from Central America and other high-migration origin regions. This change would allow immigration judges to adjudicate claims on their merits rather than forcing applicants to contort their circumstances into inadequate existing categories.

Establish an Expedited Pre-Screening System at Ports of Entry. The most effective mechanism for managing asylum claim volume at the border is a rapid, professional pre-screening process conducted at ports of entry that distinguishes, within 30 days, between claims with prima facie merit and claims that do not meet threshold eligibility criteria. Pre-screening would be conducted by trained USCIS asylum officers (not Border Patrol agents) using a standardized written assessment protocol with a brief structured interview. Applicants who pass pre-screening would be placed on an expedited court docket with a mandatory 90-day hearing timeline. Applicants who do not pass pre-screening would have the right to a one-time administrative appeal before an immigration judge on an expedited basis, with a final determination within 60 days.

Establish a Climate and Hardship Temporary Protection Category. For individuals displaced by conditions that do not meet the threshold for asylum but who face genuine harm if returned to their country of origin, specifically individuals from countries experiencing severe climate-driven food insecurity, epidemic-level gang violence, or governmental collapse, a new Temporary Protection Category (TPC) would be established. TPC status would provide five-year renewable work authorization, access to federal health and safety standards, and a defined pathway to a formal legal status determination. TPC would not be a pathway to permanent residence or citizenship by itself, but TPC holders who meet legal immigration criteria during the TPC period would be able to apply through the standard family-based or employment-based pathways.

Track Five: Address the Long-Term Unauthorized Population

The Problem

Part One documented that between 10 and 14 million people currently reside in the United States without legal authorization, and that approximately 60 percent have been here for a decade or more.²⁴ Many have been here for 20 or 25 years. They have built lives, started businesses, raised families, and paid taxes. Unauthorized workers paid an estimated $11.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $3 billion in Medicare taxes in 2022 alone, contributing to programs for which they are ineligible to receive benefits.²⁵

No enforcement-only approach has ever produced a credible operational plan for removing this population, and every independent economic analysis has concluded that attempting mass deportation of the long-term unauthorized population would cause severe economic disruption across the industries, namely agriculture, construction, food service, and domestic services, that have structural dependencies on this workforce.¹⁰ The solutions to the long-term unauthorized population must be honest about what they are. A legalization program is a legalization program. It should not be presented as anything else. The question is whether the conditions attached to it are serious enough to warrant the benefits extended, and whether the accompanying enforcement reforms are credible enough to prevent the recurrence of another multi-decade unauthorized population buildup.

The Solution

Reform Seven: A Structured Legal Status Program for Long-Term Residents

The proposed framework calls for a structured program modeled on the broad outlines of the bipartisan Dignity Act of 2025, which was reintroduced in Congress in July 2025 with bipartisan support.²⁶ The core structure of the proposed program is as follows:

Eligibility: Individuals who have been continuously present in the United States since before January 1, 2021, who have no disqualifying criminal history (defined as any felony conviction or three or more misdemeanor convictions), who pass a background check, and who pay a processing fee and restitution contribution toward border security and court infrastructure.

Status granted: A ten-year Earned Presence status, which provides work authorization, the ability to travel outside the United States and return, and access to state-level services on the same basis as lawful permanent residents. Earned Presence status is not permanent residence and is not a direct pathway to citizenship, but it is renewable and provides a stable, defined legal status.

Pathway to permanent residence: After completing the ten-year Earned Presence period without disqualifying criminal activity, an individual may apply for lawful permanent residence through the standard employment-based or family-based pathways, subject to the same criteria and waiting periods that apply to other applicants. This is not a separate fast-track pathway. It is access to the standard legal immigration system from which these individuals were previously excluded.

DACA and long-term residents under 25: Individuals who were brought to the United States as children and have lived here for the majority of their lives present a specific case that warrants a more direct resolution. The proposed framework calls for a statutory pathway to permanent residence for individuals who arrived before age 16, have been continuously present for at least ten years, have no disqualifying criminal history, and meet an education or military service requirement.

Conditionality: The Earned Presence program described above is explicitly conditioned on the simultaneous enactment of Tracks One, Two, and Three of this framework. A legalization program without a functioning legal immigration system, mandatory employer verification, and a rebuilt court system will reproduce, within a generation, the conditions that created the current unauthorized population. The lesson of 1986 must not be repeated.

Track Six: Address the Root Causes of Migration

The Problem

Part One documented in detail that the root causes of unauthorized migration from Central America and other high-migration origin regions are structural conditions in origin countries, namely poverty, endemic violence, institutional corruption, and increasingly, climate-driven agricultural failure, combined with persistent American employer demand for labor that the legal immigration system was never designed to accommodate.²⁷

A policy framework that addresses only what happens at the border and in the interior of the United States, without any attention to the structural conditions generating the migration impulse, is not a durable solution. It is a containment strategy that must be sustained indefinitely at enormous cost, with results that are inherently temporary, because the underlying pressure does not diminish.

Evidence on the effectiveness of foreign aid in addressing root causes of migration is mixed. Research published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in 2024 found that aid can temporarily reduce irregular migration but may lead to increased regular migration as conditions improve over time, because improved economic conditions give people the resources to finance planned migration.²⁸ Development aid is not a short-term migration deterrent. It is a long-term economic development investment whose migration effects may not be measurable for a generation.

The Solution

Reform Eight: A Long-Term Regional Development and Security Investment Compact

The proposed framework calls for a Regional Development Compact with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the countries of origin for the majority of unauthorized migration to the United States, modeled on the logic of the Marshall Plan rather than the logic of conditional foreign aid.

The distinction is important. Conditional aid, meaning funding contingent on measurable migration reductions, has been tried repeatedly and has failed, because the conditions it requires governments to meet are not within those governments’ immediate control, and because the funding levels have been insufficient to produce the structural changes needed.²⁹ A compact modeled on the Marshall Plan commits to sustained, substantial investment over a defined multi-year period (fifteen years is proposed here) in exchange for verifiable structural reforms in governance, rule of law, and economic development.

Specific commitments from participating countries would include:

1. Audited anti-corruption programs with measurable benchmarks, monitored by an independent body with U.S. and partner-country representation

2. Legal system reform programs, including judicial independence, legal aid infrastructure, and public defender systems

3. Agricultural development investments specifically targeting small-holder farming communities affected by climate-driven crop failure, with technical assistance from U.S. Department of Agriculture programs

4. Violence reduction programs in high-emigration municipalities, modeled on evidence-based community violence intervention models

U.S. investments under the compact would be channeled primarily through private sector partnerships, targeted to industries, namely agricultural technology, renewable energy, and infrastructure construction, that generate sustainable employment in origin communities. Direct cash transfers to governments would be minimized in favor of project-specific funding with independent oversight.

This investment is not charity. It is a national security and economic security calculation. The cost of sustained border enforcement, detention operations, and court backlog management under a no-investment-in-origin-countries scenario is measurable in tens of billions of dollars annually. A fifteen-year development compact that produces even a 20 percent reduction in unauthorized migration pressure from Central America would generate fiscal savings that dwarf its cost.

The framework acknowledges the academic research establishing that development aid’s effects on migration are long-term rather than immediate. The compact is therefore presented as a generation-long commitment, not a short-term migration management tool. It is one component of a comprehensive framework, not a substitute for the legal pathway and enforcement reforms of Tracks One through Five.

Part III: Institutional Governance: Building a System That Lasts

The Lesson of Four Decades of Failed Reform

Part One documented that every major immigration reform effort since 1986 has failed to produce a durable solution. The IRCA grand bargain of 1986 legalized millions and failed to enforce. The 1990 caps became outdated within a decade and were never updated. The 1996 enforcement expansion made the unauthorized population larger, not smaller. The comprehensive reform efforts of 2007 and 2013 collapsed before reaching a vote.

The reasons for these failures are structural, not personal. They are rooted in the six-stage policy cycle’s systematic underfunding of Stages 3 through 6, namely policy formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation, in favor of the perpetual Stage 2 loop of agenda-setting and political performance documented in America’s Biggest Problems Keep Getting Worse.¹ Solutions are proposed before problems are fully defined. Enforcement is expanded before courts are funded. Pathways are narrowed before alternatives are created.

A reform framework designed to last fifty to one hundred years must include institutional structures specifically designed to prevent the recurrence of this failure pattern. The following institutional mechanisms are integral components of the proposed framework.

An Independent Immigration Policy Commission

The proposed framework calls for the establishment of a permanent, independent Immigration Policy Commission, an independent federal body modeled on the Federal Reserve’s structure of professional governance insulated from short-term political pressure, with the following authorities:

1. Conduct and publish the biennial labor market and demographic review that sets legal immigration allocations under the demand-responsive framework of Track One

2. Monitor and publicly report on implementation progress across all six tracks of the reform framework, with annual reports to Congress

3. Trigger mandatory congressional review procedures when implementation benchmarks are not met, creating accountability mechanisms for Stage 5 failures

4. Conduct the Stage 6 policy evaluation function: measuring outcomes across the legal immigration system, the employer verification system, the immigration courts, and the humanitarian protection system against defined benchmarks, and publishing findings publicly on a two-year cycle

Commission members would be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to staggered six-year terms. The Commission would have no enforcement authority. Its function is research, monitoring, evaluation, and public reporting, the institutional equivalent of a financial auditor for the immigration system as a whole.

A Statutory Ten-Year Review Mechanism

The immigration system must have a built-in mechanism for updating its legal framework as conditions change. The core failure documented in Part One, that immigration caps set in 1990 remained in place for thirty-five years despite being profoundly misaligned with economic reality, must not be permitted to recur.

The proposed framework includes a statutory requirement for a comprehensive decennial review of the entire Immigration and Nationality Act, conducted by the Immigration Policy Commission in consultation with Congress, with binding recommendations to Congress requiring a floor vote within twelve months of submission. This mechanism does not require Congress to adopt the recommendations. It requires Congress to vote on them. The combination of a professional evaluation and a mandatory floor vote creates both the evidence base and the political accountability mechanism needed to keep the system updated over time.

Consolidated Interagency Coordination

Part One documented the institutional fragmentation created by the post-9/11 reorganization of federal immigration agencies: USCIS, CBP, and ICE operate under DHS, while the immigration courts (EOIR) operate under DOJ.³⁰ This split-department structure produces coordination failures that are not exceptional events but structural features of the current design.

The proposed framework calls for the consolidation of USCIS and EOIR under a single Department of Homeland Security umbrella, with a dedicated Deputy Secretary for Immigration Policy responsible for coordinating policy across all four immigration agencies. This does not require the elimination or reorganization of any agency. It requires a unified chain of authority and coordination mechanism that currently does not exist.

Part IV: Implementation Architecture and Timeline

The reforms described in this document are complex, interdependent, and long-term in their effects. Their successful implementation requires a phased timeline that sequences reforms in the right order, invests in institutional capacity before expanding requirements, and establishes clear accountability benchmarks at each stage. The proposed implementation architecture is organized around a fifteen-year timeline with three five-year phases.

Phase One: Foundation (Years One Through Five)

1. Enact the Immigration Policy Commission and establish its governance structure

2. Enact the Article I Immigration Court conversion and begin the judicial hiring program

3. Enact the legal pathway modernization legislation and initiate the demand-responsive visa framework

4. Implement Phase One of mandatory E-Verify for large employers and federal contractors

5. Launch the USCIS backlog reduction program

6. Initiate negotiations on the Regional Development Compact with Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries

7. Establish the humanitarian protection pre-screening system at ports of entry

8. Launch the Earned Presence program for long-term unauthorized residents concurrent with the above enforcement and pathway reforms

Measurement benchmarks at Year Five:

1. Immigration court backlog reduced by at least 40 percent from the 2026 baseline

2. USCIS administrative backlog reduced by at least 30 percent

3. E-Verify coverage expanded to all large employers and federal contractors

4. Legal immigration processing times for employment-based applicants reduced to an average of 24 months or less

5. Earned Presence applications received and processed with a 90-day target determination window

Phase Two: Scaling (Years Six Through Ten)

1. Expand mandatory E-Verify to all employers with 50 or more employees

2. Complete Article I immigration court conversion and reach 1,200 immigration judges

3. Initiate biometric identity authentication pilot for next-generation E-Verify

4. Complete first biennial labor market review under the demand-responsive framework and adjust visa allocations accordingly

5. Implement first Regional Development Compact investment cycle with measurable outputs

6. Conduct first decennial review of the Immigration and Nationality Act

Measurement benchmarks at Year Ten:

1. Immigration court backlog reduced by at least 75 percent from the 2026 baseline

2. Average time from asylum application to final determination: 18 months or less

3. E-Verify coverage at 80 percent of all new hires nationally

4. Legal immigration processing times for employment-based applicants: 18 months or less for most categories

5. Unauthorized border encounters trending downward compared to Year One baseline

Phase Three: Stabilization (Years Eleven Through Fifteen)

1. Universal mandatory E-Verify fully implemented

2. Biometric identity authentication system deployed nationally

3. Immigration court backlog at manageable sustainable levels, with ongoing case completion rates exceeding new case intake

4. First comprehensive Earned Presence cohort eligible for permanent residence pathway applications

5. Second decennial review of the Immigration and Nationality Act incorporating lessons from Phase One and Phase Two

6. Regional Development Compact first five-year evaluation with evidence-based course corrections

Measurement benchmarks at Year Fifteen:

1. Immigration court backlog at or below 500,000 cases, a level consistent with a functioning court system under normal intake conditions

2. USCIS administrative backlog at or below 2 million cases

3. Unauthorized workforce as a share of total employment reduced by at least 50 percent from the 2026 baseline

4. Legal immigration system processing an annual volume of immigrants calibrated to documented labor market demand, without multi-decade wait queues for any category

Part V: What a Functional System Looks Like

The goal of this framework is not simply to fix what is broken. The goal is to build what has never existed: an American immigration system that is functional, fair, predictable, and durable. A description of what that system looks like in practice serves as the closing standard against which this framework should be judged.

For an employer: Federal law is clear, consistently enforced, and operationally straightforward. E-Verify provides a reliable, fast determination of work authorization that protects employers from legal liability and ensures that their workforce is legally employed. The employment-based immigration system provides realistic, predictable pathways for recruiting skilled workers at timelines measured in months rather than decades.

For a legal immigrant: The system processes applications on a timeline that is consistent with human career planning and family formation. A skilled worker from any country in the world can receive a determination within 24 months. A family member sponsored by a U.S. citizen has a realistic expectation of resolution within a defined timeframe. A person following the rules experiences a system that functions and responds.

For a person seeking asylum: The system has a professional, humane pre-screening process that evaluates claims against a modernized legal standard within 30 days. People with credible claims have a defined pathway to a hearing within 90 days. People whose claims do not meet the threshold have a swift, due-process-protected determination and a prompt, dignified return.

For the American economy: The legal immigration system supplies labor at the volumes and skill levels that the economy actually needs, calibrated through a biennial evidence-based review rather than fixed by statute in 1990. The demographic pipeline for Social Security and Medicare is stable. Industries that depend on foreign-born workers have legal pathways that eliminate the structural incentive for unauthorized employment.

For the American taxpayer: Enforcement spending is matched by adjudication capacity, so that money spent on border operations produces actual case resolutions rather than growing backlogs. Court cases are resolved in months rather than years, reducing the detention costs that accumulate during indefinite legal limbo. The system is measured against public benchmarks, evaluated against actual outcomes, and updated through a defined institutional process rather than left to deteriorate for decades between reform crises.

That is the immigration system this framework is designed to build. It is not the system we have today. But it is the system that the structural analysis in Part One demonstrates is achievable, and the solutions in this document describe how to get there.

Conclusion: The Complexity That Demands Action

The immigration problem has resisted solution for forty years not because it is too complex to solve, but because the political incentives have consistently favored keeping it broken. As America’s Biggest Problems Keep Getting Worse established plainly: an unsolved problem raises money, turns out a base, and gives the other side something to be blamed for. A solved problem is yesterday’s news.¹

This framework is built on the opposite conviction. The immigration system is solvable. It is not solvable with enforcement alone. It is not solvable with legalization alone. It is not solvable with any single-lever approach that addresses one structural failure while ignoring the others. It is solvable with an integrated, sequenced, evidence-based framework that treats the problem as what Part One demonstrated it to be: a legal system misaligned with economic reality, an adjudication system starved of resources, a humanitarian framework built for a different century, and a workforce dependency that requires legal channels rather than underground ones.

The solutions presented here are not painless. A functional legal immigration system requires sustained investment in institutional capacity. A credible employer verification system requires requirements that carry real consequences. A rebuilt immigration court requires the judicial staffing and independence that have been withheld for decades. A resolved unauthorized population requires a legal status program that is honest about what it is. An addressed root cause problem requires a generation-long investment commitment.

These are not small things. They are also not optional. The alternative, the current trajectory, is a system that continues to deteriorate, a backlog that continues to grow, an unauthorized population that continues to exist in legal limbo, and a workforce dependency that continues to be met through underground channels rather than legal ones.

The framework in this document is designed to last fifty to one hundred years. It will require updating. The decennial review mechanism is designed for exactly that purpose. But the structural logic, which is to enforce and expand pathways together, invest in adjudication as heavily as enforcement, modernize the humanitarian framework for contemporary realities, resolve the long-term unauthorized population on honest and conditional terms, and address root causes with the patience and investment they actually require, is not a framework that will need to be rebuilt from scratch in twenty years. It is a framework that can be maintained, calibrated, and improved over time.

That is what serious governance looks like.

This document is Part Two of the Centercratic Party’s comprehensive immigration policy initiative. Part One, America’s Immigration Crisis: What Is Broken and Why It Matters, is available at centercratic.party and centervoter.com.

Prepared by the Centercratic Party Research and Policy Division centercratic.party | centervoter.com

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