The demographic need
The American workforce is shrinking. Below-replacement birth rates, restrictive immigration, and earlier retirement combine into a projected 2.5-million-per-year workforce deficit by 2035. Manufacturing, healthcare, construction, and the skilled trades are already short — half a million electricians, plumbers, and welders today, expanding annually. The Social Stack’s family-formation supports raise the birth rate over decades, but the labor-market gap is open now, and a country that does not staff its hospitals, build its housing, or maintain its grid does not keep its standard of living.
The Accord answers with managed immigration sized to the gap: 1.75 million workers a year at maturity, ramping from 1 million in Year 1 as the new intake system stands up. That number is set by the labor shortage, not by an applicant queue.
Admission, controlled at the right grain
The same intake number can be wage-suppressing or wage-stabilizing depending onhow people are admitted. The Accord admits along five controllable axes so placement matches need:
Admission is targeted to the localities and regions actually short of labor — COMPASS shortage indicators (primary-care HPSAs, mental-health HPSAs, childcare deserts, transit-job-access deserts, broadband deserts) identify where the labor belongs. Hosting communities draw their share of the surcharge pool that arrives with the worker.
Admission is tied to documented sectoral shortage, not to a single national cap that lumps everyone together. Skilled trades, healthcare, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, eldercare — each pulls from its own shortage signal, with quotas adjusted as conditions change.
Admission targets working-age adults specifically — the instrument is sized to the labor-market gap, and from day one the surcharge is withheld from every admitted worker’s wage and remitted, and the worker pays standard payroll tax.
Functional English (or, for designated bilingual regions, the local working language) is required so workers can integrate and advance — and the English-language score is one of the quantifiable factors in the surcharge formula itself. This protects both the immigrant’s wage trajectory and the domestic floor.
The system is agnostic regarding cyclic return to the home country. A worker may stay and integrate (the surcharge declining with tenure as the worker pays standard payroll tax and income tax), or rotate home — both paths are valid.
Without these controls, intake distorts wages — too many entrants in one trade, too few in another; everyone in three coastal metros, no one in the counties with the actual shortage. With them, the labor that arrives matches the labor that’s needed, and the wage floor holds.
The Employer Parity Surcharge — pricing the externality at source
Cheap labor is cheap because the cost of cheapness is shifted onto someone else — domestic low-wage workers, the localities absorbing the service-cost externality, and the public infrastructure that scales without compensating revenue. The Employer Parity Surcharge prices that cost at source, applying the same Pigouvian logic the Accord uses on carbon emissions: charge the actor creating the cost, route the revenue to the parties bearing it.
The surcharge is a three-way balance of benefits, not an extraction. The worker gains an immigration visa and a job that pays better than home, with full Distributed Healthcare from Day 1, Skills Wallet accrual, and a path to citizenship. The employer gains access to a labor pool larger than domestic-only — at exact wage parity, so the expanded pool never comes at domestic workers' expense. The community gains the funded capacity to welcome: school seats, clinic hours, ESL programs, paid for by the work itself and arriving on the same calendar as the workers.
Mechanically, the employer pays the same as for a domestic hire — the full domestic-equivalent prevailing wage, plus the standard payroll tax on top, identical for any hire; misclassification is payroll-tax fraud with corporate liability. The surcharge is withheld from the worker’s wage at payroll (the employer remits it, like withholding), reducing take-home during the integration years — floored at the minimum wage — and rising toward full parity as the rate declines with tenure. The rate for a given hire comes from a published scoring formula over quantifiable factors: credentials and licensure, English-language score, years of experience, and an age band targeting young adults. The National Statistics Board (NSB) has authority to calibrate the formula weights against measured supply and demand, under a published, appealable, methodology-audited process; localities can nudge rates within published bounds for capacity, culture, and employer need. Origin country plays no role in the rate.
Illustrative landing points of the published formula (indicative, not statutory): a credentialed nurse lands near ~12%, a licensed electrician near ~40%, seasonal manual work near ~90% — each declining with tenure to ~10% per worker by Year 9 as the worker integrates and pays standard payroll tax and income tax. The schedule has two consequences:
- Wage stabilization. An employer cannot undercut domestic pay by hiring an admitted worker — the employer’s cost is the same domestic-equivalent wage plus the same payroll tax either way, so an immigrant is never the cheaper option. Pay parity, not pay competition.
- Integration on a clock. The withheld share falls as the worker advances, so the path off the schedule is the same path every American worker climbs: skill, tenure, productivity. By Year 9 the worker takes home nearly the full domestic-equivalent wage — the rate is ~10% of its starting level.
And the formula prices ultra-low-wage substitution out of existence by design: the worker’s wage plus the surcharge on it together equal the domestic-equivalent rate, so near the minimum wage there is no legal wage low enough to carry a ~90% surcharge — take-home cannot fall below the minimum wage, and raising the offer to make the math work costs more than a domestic hire. That is the point, because the surcharge is the externality price of the schools, healthcare, and services that host communities provide for the worker’s family.
The domestic-share test keeps the declared wage honest. The “domestic-equivalent prevailing wage” is verified by revealed preference — the proof that a declared wage is the true market rate is that domestic workers actually take the job at it. Without a test, an employer could declare a lowball wage for work no American does at that pay and still fill the jobs with workers under economic-flight pressure who pool housing and accept the small post-surcharge residue. When a job category's domestic share shows the declared wage is a lowball, the surcharge rate for that category adjusts until the offered wage rises to a level domestic workers actually accept. The rates are dynamic by design: the same mechanism balances labor supply and demand category by category. The Accord sets the goal, not a fixed prescription — thresholds, measurement, and the adjustment schedule are NSB rule-making under a published, appealable, methodology-audited process.
Where the surcharge revenue goes
The revenue pools nationally; each host community draws its share of the pool apportioned by immigrant count and local need — the money follows the hosted immigrants to the communities serving them, not the hiring location — and spends it locally on the services that absorb newcomers. The apportionment is COMPASS-weighted, heavier toward low-capacity / hollowed-out places; the exact inter-community weights are NSB / Treasury rule-making, not published. Communities qualify both as places hosting admitted workers’ families and as places hosting refugees or asylum seekers (even before residents are employed).
| Where the weight goes | What the funds do |
|---|---|
| Heavier — low-capacity / hollowed-out tracts | Places with the largest measured shortages on the COMPASS shortage-indicator suite (healthcare access, broadband, food access, housing supply, civic capacity) receive the largest per-immigrant allocation. The surcharge becomes a capacity-building stream for the places that most need it. |
| Lighter — high-capacity established cities | Cities with deep immigrant-receiving infrastructure already in place — the established gateways — receive a smaller per-immigrant allocation, on the principle that marginal capacity-building dollars travel further where the capacity is missing. |
| Refugee + asylum hosting | Communities hosting refugees or asylum seekers qualify even before the hosted residents are employed. Refugee and asylum-seeker healthcare is covered by Distributed Healthcare (the universal floor), not by a separate surcharge slice. |
None of the surcharge goes to the General Fund — it is a price tag on the externality, paid to the parties bearing the cost. Targeted, not ring-fenced. Specific apportionment weights are set by NSB / Treasury rule-making against the COMPASS indicators and are not published as fixed percentages.
Intake ramp and steady state
Federal control of intake already exists; what is new is the intake system itself — the scoring formula, the placement machinery, the community apportionment. Intake ramps over four years as that system stands up, with each step gated on COMPASS absorption indicators in the receiving communities. This is the administrative ramp of the new system, not a new quota concept.
| Year | Annual intake |
|---|---|
| Year 1 | 1,000,000 |
| Year 2 | 1,250,000 |
| Year 3 | 1,500,000 |
| Year 4+ | 1,750,000 (steady state) |
The Genius-Track visa system (PhD Completion, Graduate Talent Visa, Postdoctoral, Alliance-Incentive Fast-Track) is separate and additive — combined steady-state flow ~46,000–62,000/year of graduate-level STEM talent, independent of the 1.75M surcharge-governed volume.
Model your scenario — the surcharge calculator
The architecture above is fixed. The numbers — what the surcharge withholds from a given hire’s wage, how it declines over nine years of tenure, how the worker’s take-home rises toward the full domestic-equivalent wage — are model-able. The calculator lets you set the occupation class and the domestic-equivalent wage and see the surcharge schedule that falls out.