Introduction

Over the course of American history, immigrants and their descendants have fostered economic dynamism and cultural ingenuity. The nation has reaped the benefits of immigration, as have local communities where new arrivals live, work, and participate in civic life. But not all communities have benefited to the same degree from America’s status as an immigration hub. Though thriving immigrant communities exist across the United States, new arrivals continue to concentrate in large cities and traditional destination states. Nonetheless, immigration has the potential to inject dynamism and growth into communities that, with an infusion of new residents and workers, are well placed to thrive.

This report makes the case for a new immigration program that will provide economic opportunity for immigrants while also helping to revitalize the economies of communities across the country. We dub this program “Community Partnership Visas” (CPVs). Through CPVs, eligible communities would apply to the federal government to become destinations for immigrants settling in the country under a new employment-based visa stream. The program would be open to workers of all types and skills, with communities determining the types of immigrants that would best suit their needs.

The idea for a CPV program emerged from the work of the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy (CORE), convened by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences with the goal of redirecting the national focus from how the economy is doing toward how Americans are doing. Released in November 2023, CORE’s final report, Advancing a People-First Economy, offers fifteen recommendations that received unanimous agreement from the cross-partisan, interdisciplinary Commission. These recommendations were rooted in thirty-one listening sessions held across the country. A major theme of these conversations—and of the Commission’s final report—is the observation that some parts of the country have not fully benefited from the waves of prosperity and technological progress of the last few decades. One of the Commission’s key recommendations is a program to “allow states or municipalities to sponsor immigrants to boost their economies.” While the Commission offers some guiding principles for the design of CPVs, it concludes that “further analysis is needed to determine some elements of the program.”2

To that end, in 2024 the Academy assembled a working group of immigration policy experts to develop a comprehensive framework for CPVs under the leadership of Academy member Cristina Rodríguez, Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School (see Appendix A for a list of working group members). Drawing on a diverse set of perspectives across the immigration field, the working group considered previously unaddressed questions about CPV program design. This report makes the case for CPVs and offers a framework for their development and implementation. Not every member of the working group agrees with every element of the program as proposed in this report, but all were willing to endorse the totality of the proposal out of a recognition that CPVs would help address the challenges facing many American communities.

The Academy working group is not the first entity to propose the creation of a place-based visa program. This idea has received endorsements from scholars at organizations and think tanks that span the political spectrum, including the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Cato Institute, and FWD.us; the U.S. Conference of Mayors; and a diverse group of politicians on both sides of the aisle, including former Republican governors Asa Hutchinson (Arkansas) and Eric Holcomb (Indiana) and current Republican governor Spencer Cox (Utah), and former Democratic Secretary of the Department of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.3 These endorsements indicate the broad appeal of such a program. Only one proposal, from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), considers in detail how a program like CPVs would work in practice. EIG’s proposal focuses exclusively on high-skilled immigration, however, while our report treats this as just one part of a more comprehensive program.4

Our report begins by identifying how immigration can serve as a source of revitalization for American communities facing economic challenges. The second part of the report lays out how CPVs would work, providing details developed by the working group on topics ranging from community eligibility to federal oversight to visa recipient mobility. The working group did not attempt to answer every conceivable question related to the design and implementation of CPVs. Many features of the visa program would necessarily be developed by the policymakers and administrators who would bring it to life, including through consultation with the public and with state and local officials. But this report offers a detailed blueprint for an innovative, data-driven policy that should be part of the future of American immigration.