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, phased in from 250,000 in Year 1. 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 localities receive the Wedge revenue 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.
Working-age adults. The system does not provide preference for elderly parents of admitted workers — admission is a labor-market instrument, not a family-reunification chain that lands a fiscal liability on Distributed Healthcare and Social Security 2.0 before any contribution has been made.
Functional English (or, for designated bilingual regions, the local working language) is required so workers can integrate, advance, and exit the Wedge as their pay rises. 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 (paying standard payroll tax and income tax once the Wedge phases down), or rotate home — both paths are valid. The Wedge revenue routed to origin communities through the Global Parity Investment Fund makes return economically rational where it suits the worker.
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.
Immigrant labor — 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 Parity Wedge 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.
Mechanically, the Wedge is a graduated labor-market-access charge paid by the admitted worker (and, in practice, by the employer through wage-equivalent structuring): 100% in Year 1, declining to 10% by Year 9, then held at 10% 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 Wedge raises the all-in cost of admitted labor to the American-equivalent rate. Pay parity, not pay competition.
- Integration on a clock. The Wedge 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 immigrant pays the same effective rate as the citizen colleague.
Where the Wedge revenue goes
The entire wedge is statutorily routed to domestic hosting communities— before it reaches the General Fund — and apportioned by the COMPASS measurement system rather than by a fixed federal formula. Communities qualify both as employers’ hosting locations 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 wedge 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 wedge slice. |
None of the wedge goes to the General Fund — it is a price tag on the externality, paid to the parties bearing the cost. Specific apportionment weights are set by NSB / Treasury rule-making against the COMPASS indicators and are not published as fixed percentages.
Phase-in and steady-state intake
| Year | Annual intake |
|---|---|
| Year 1 | 250,000 |
| Year 2 | 500,000 |
| Year 3 | 1,000,000 |
| Year 4 | 1,500,000 |
| Year 5+ | 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 Wedge volume.
Model your scenario — Wedge calculator
The architecture above is fixed. The numbers — what the wedge yields at a given intake, how the COMPASS-weighted allocation lands across hosting communities, what the worker takes home year-by-year — are model-able. The calculator lets you set intake, profession mix, and phase-in years and see the revenue and worker outcomes that fall out.