Can We Finally Get Rid of the Visa Lottery?

In his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty asks “What exactly did terrorist Sayfullo Saipov bring to the United States that we needed so badly?” The answer is, Diversity!

Saipov (whose first name, fittingly, is from the Arabic for “Sword of Allah”) seems to have come here from Uzbekistan through the Diversity Visa Lottery. The visa lottery was enacted in its current form in 1990 as affirmative action for white immigrants, who couldn’t qualify under the other categories because they lacked job skills or close-enough family – i.e., to “diversify” the immigration flow. It has since morphed into affirmative action for African and Muslim immigrants. It admits each year 50,000 immigrants (temporarily down from 55,000 for reasons too convoluted to bother with) from countries that don’t send many immigrants to the U.S.

AP/Evan Vucci

Of course, the admission of one jihadi killer through this cockamamie program (several, actually) isn’t in itself enough of a reason to rid of it. But there are plenty more. (I recently did a quickie video on the lottery, and CIS analysis of it, going back decades, is here.)

From a security standpoint, the program admits a disproportionate share of immigrants from terrorist breeding grounds, and creates new migration networks from those places where none existed before. Looking at the 2015 green card data (the most recent available) shows the lottery accounted for less than 5 percent of total green cards issued that year. But the percentages of green cards from potential terror hotspots that were granted through the visa lottery are much larger:

Read the rest of the story HERE and follow links below to related stories/opinions:

Donald Trump Calls for Immediate End to ‘Diversity Visa’ Program That Admitted New York Terror Suspect to U.S.

Trump Is Right About The Diversity Visa Lottery And Democrats Are Hypocrites, But It’s Still The Wrong Time To Talk About Policy Reform

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