Are you the next Albert Einstein? Wait in line, please.

America, so goes the conventional wisdom, is the land of opportunity. The land of self-made men. The land where the best and brightest can rise through nothing but their ability and will. The United States, however, could soon lose that reputation. In a little-noticed article in last Saturday's Washington Post, Anthony Faiola and Robin Shulman reported: 

For years, foreign-born Nobel Prize winners, corporate officers, and top talents in sports, arts and sciences have had a fast track to permanent residency, and eventually citizenship, in the United States.

According to the current draft of the immigration bill, however, foreign nationals of extraordinary ability will have to queue up with everyone else for a work permit. This is because the bill does not provide anything like the EB-1 visa, a special track that currently allows talented applicants to bypass the ordinary immigration process.

Should the bill pass in its present form, even individuals of extraordinary abilities like John Lennon or Albert Einstein would instead be subjected to a complicated point system that judges them according to their level of education, English proficiency, and a few other factors. (Being a superstar is only worth eight out of 100 points, less than the 10 points for having a degree from a community college.) Philippe Legrain raised some important problems with this point system in a recent web exclusive for FP. But to my mind, it's the elimination of the EB-1 visa—and the possibility that rare geniuses who want to come to the United States might be rejected—that is most troubling.