paul: the college board adding a new twist to the is s.a.t. with a plan to assigned so-call adversity scores to every student who takes the college admissions test, an effort to capture a student s socioeconomic background using 15 factors including the crime rate and housing values in a student s neighborhood, parents median income and education level. students won t be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when reviewing applications. we re back with dan henninger, allysia finley and mary anastasia o grady. is this a better s.a.t.? i think it s a bad idea. we should stiphate in the beginning that i think what society wants to do as a whole is insure we have mobility. paul: economic mobility, social mobility if. yeah. that you can move up. mobility s a very important part of the american experience. so that s the attempt, okay? is so let s just establish that
similar merit-based system. it would also cut illegal immigration in half whereas this would maintain the current level, it would just reduce family-based migration for distant relatives. paul: mary, what do you think? government deciding what s valuable, what could go wrong? [laughter] paul: you ve got to have some rules on immigration, don t you? well, no, i don t like the idea that they re, you know, going to decide who s exceptional and they re going to choose them. exceptional students, really? those are usually not the foundation of entrepreneurs. they re the people really that you want the least. you want people with entrepreneurial ambition. paul: but government is already deciding on the basis of family ties, so is there is some discretion that but there s another way, you could have a line. you could have a list. you could have a queue where you don t decide, you don t judge who s valuable and who s not valuable. you make the queue, and you process the immigration. th
immigration, very similar to health care. the dreamers really was, they tried doing something last year several times, but they got hammered by the right on amnesty. so they re trying to rally and unify the base, but i don t think it s going to beer theically successful. paul: mary, do you think this is a good campaign proposal for trump the, or does this give democrats ap edge? no, i think it s good for trump. at least he s putting something out there, he s trying. and i think that democrats reaction to it really is transparent. i mean, it shows they don t want to solve this problem. at a very minimum, they could have come back and said, okay, let s see what we can trade. instead, nancy says dead on arrival. paul: that s particularly true, dan, if they don t solve this asylum issue. families coming over the border, the numbers keep increasing. yeah.
admitted because of family ties. we re back with dan henninger, alicia fin hi is and columnist mary anastasia to to o grady. all right, it s a sketchy plan, there s not a lot of details, but to extent there are details or principles, what do you like in the plan? well, it is very vague, but it supposedly would increase the number of foreign high-skilled workers who could stay in the u.s. is so those who go to u.s. universities, get can stay with green cards. this is necessary for finance firms, pharmaceutical companies, they would really like this. paul: so if you re highly educated, you go to stanford, get a s.t.e.m. degree right now we re basically sending them back to china to work for companies that compete with u.s. companies. paul: what about the the this is different, though, than what the president has proposed in the past, is it not? he s endorsed the raise act which would cut illegal immigration in half. right. the raise act also included a
parents, you scrimp and save and don t take vacations and sacrifice to live in a better neighborhood with better schools, you re going to be penalized because of that sacrifice, potentially. yeah, that s right. and, you know, you re getting at something that s kind of, i mean, mary is right, we do promote upward mobility in the united states. and there are lots and lots of families whose upward mobility consists of a generation working class family, works very hard, moves to a better neighborhood, they move up, their children go to college, first ones who go to college, and then those children move on to a better neighborhood and have children. paul: right. this would strike at the heart of that first generation movement up the income scale. it s one thing, you know, we talk about the privileged kids, they live on park avenue, they ve been rich, their grandparents were rich. no, this would hurt people who, in one generation, had moved up the income scale. paul: what s interesting t