Dear Editor, NYT

As you report today, the immigration "reforms," as currently contemplated, would "admit foreigners who scored highest on a scale that values advanced degrees, skills approved by the Department of Labor, and fluency in English, much more than family ties."

Discontinuing the practice of favoring family ties seems a step towards fairness – why should the childless and those dispossessed by or distant from "families" be penalized? (And isn't "family" a strangely little-inspected category, anyway?)

But your report errs in just the way that the proposal's backers do. You find no one in Congress, the Administration, or among informed observers of this whole grandstanding, dishonest, self-satisfying, and condescending push for "reform" who can state the obvious: The proposal, while deemphasizing mere familial genetic inheritance, does advance a quasi-eugenic measure of immigration worthiness.

Not only are the historic precedents of that thinking telling, and frightening; the theory underlying it – that smart people or ones privileged enough to receive education are most worthy (fair-minded? honest? neighborly?...) – is inane.

What might be the alternative? Well, for starters, an American Community in which citizens of all North and South American countries could, with background checks, move freely around the hemisphere, and work wherever they could find work. We might then see just how quickly non-US citizens happily left the US, to go back to their families and home territories, as soon as their economic needs were met. We might also reap the rewards of having the most intrepid, resourceful, family-independent travelers stay.

Sincerely