Sponsors (8)
The bill shifts U.S. immigration toward a merit- and enforcement-focused system that aims to protect domestic workers and attract high‑skill talent but does so by sharply curtailing family- and diversity-based pathways, imposing new employer obligations and penalties, creating conditional-status risks for immigrants, and increasing administrative complexity with significant distributional impacts.
U.S. workers (including unemployed and middle-class applicants) gain stronger protections against displacement because employers must document recruitment, consider equally or better qualified U.S. applicants, and remedies (including hiring or backpay) are available when unlawful hiring occurs.
High-skilled prospective immigrants and employers benefit from a clearer, merit-based admissions system with a transparent points rubric, regular selection rounds, and published tie-break priorities, improving predictability for employers and prioritizing STEM/advanced skills for U.S. competitiveness.
Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens retain immediate-relative priority, preserving a direct path for core nuclear family reunification (children and spouses).
Millions of Diversity Visa applicants and lottery hopefuls lose a long-standing pathway because the Diversity Visa program is eliminated and many pending or potential diversity-category petitions are barred or invalidated.
U.S. citizens seeking to sponsor parents and many family-preference beneficiaries face major new barriers because parents are removed from the immediate-relative category, caps and parolee deductions lower family visa supply, and many pending family petitions are invalidated or limited to a small grandfathered allocation.
People with existing employment‑based petitions risk losing long-pursued green card opportunities because pending or approved employment petitions may be invalidated or displaced by the new points-based system.
Based on analysis of 7 sections of legislative text.
Eliminates the Diversity Visa, creates a points‑based employment system with conditional two‑year green cards, narrows family visas, adds employer/petitioner attestations and penalties, and restricts certain education benefits.
Official title: To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to protect American workers and values.
Introduced April 29, 2026 by Barry Moore · Last progress April 29, 2026
Replaces major parts of the legal immigration system with new limits and requirements: it ends the Diversity Visa lottery, replaces employment-based immigrant categories with a points-based program with conditional permanent residence rules, narrows family‑based visas to prioritize spouses and minor children (removing parents from the immediate‑relative class), creates new employer and petitioner attestation and enforcement rules, and restricts certain public‑education and higher‑education benefits for non‑permanent residents. Several new statutory definitions, civil penalties, administrative processes, and numerical caps are added, with many provisions effective on enactment. The bill affects visa allocations, employer obligations, petition procedures, conditional lawful permanent residence for points-based immigrants, religious-worker visas, and state/local education and college tuition rules. It creates new enforcement tools for the Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security and ties some visa limits to detention and parole statistics.