Most Americans wouldn’t qualify to come to the U.S. under the skills test proposed by new immigration legislation, reports the New York Times. That fact has become a major talking point for opponents of the Cotton-Perdue bill. You may recall how political analyst Stuart Rothenberg clumsily noted that a lot of West Virginians wouldn’t qualify. The article is titled, “How Many Americans Would Pass an Immigration Test Endorsed by Trump?”

It’s not a helpful question for thinking through immigration policy. A lot of people want to come here. Maybe there’s an argument for not selecting the cream of the crop, or for the absurdity of the criteria that Cotton-Perdue uses for selection. But that argument can’t be that a lot of our fellow citizens would not qualify if, hypothetically, they were foreigners. That just shows that the selection criteria are doing their job. The problem with the Rothenberg argument is that it assumes, without defending, the peculiar view that our immigration policy should treat would-be immigrants on par with Americans.