Sen. Tommy Tuberville's ASSIMILATION Act is the most sweeping of the three immigration bills I've written about this week, and it's worth closing the week on because it goes furthest on the exact mechanism I've spent five days arguing actually matters: wage. The bill would cap H-1B at 50,000 visas annually, require pay at 200% of the relevant median wage, and limit the visa to three years with no renewal option. It eliminates the diversity visa lottery entirely, narrows family-based immigration, caps total employment-based immigration at 140,000 a year, and requires a "national interest" certification for green cards generally.
Run the 200%-of-median wage floor against everything I've documented this week and the outsourcing math simply stops working. Infosys and Tata's H-1B wages in the $65,000-$70,000 range, the Disney contractors paid 33-39% below the American staff they replaced — none of that survives a rule requiring double the median wage for the role. That's not a tweak to the incentive structure. That's an incentive structure with the incentive removed. If this provision alone became law, I'd expect the L-1/H-1B outsourcing pipeline I wrote about Thursday to functionally shut down within a cap cycle or two, because the cost advantage that makes it worthwhile disappears entirely.
That's also exactly why I think the bill, as a whole, overreaches. A wage floor that ends wage arbitrage is precision. A three-year non-renewable limit on every H-1B holder, regardless of role or performance, is a blunt instrument that guarantees churn for its own sake — pushing out a genuinely scarce specialist as readily as a commodity role, with no mechanism to tell the two apart. And folding the diversity visa elimination, family-based restructuring, and a "national interest" certification requirement into the same bill as the wage-floor fix means a genuinely good idea has to survive a vote on three or four separate, much more contestable ideas to become law.
This is the same critique I made of the Americans First Immigration Act Wednesday, just sharper: the wage floor is the policy that actually does the work this newsletter has been arguing for all week. Everything else attached to it is baggage that makes the good part less likely to pass, not more.