Loading ...The Un-American Elimination of the Diversity Visa Lottery Program
By: Meriam Helal/Arab America Contributing Writer
The U.S. is known around the world for being the world’s melting pot due to its diversity and inclusion. One way the U.S. has upheld its status is the Diversity Visa Lottery Program. It was implemented in1986, where millions of people apply and less than 1% get selected, which amounts to fifty thousand immigrants every year.
This program requires that applicants are adults with a high school diploma or recent employment. This is a unique program because it does not require applicants to get a sponsor from an employer or family member to apply. Recipients of the lottery can bring their spouses and minor children.
Denyse Sabagh, the head of the Duane Morris law firm’s Immigration Practice Group, told Arab America that recipients of the visa have to “provide all their documents: including birth certificate, criminal record, marriage certificate, and background checks. Anyone wins the diversity visa would have to provide documents like all other immigrants.”
Photo: Denyse Sabagh
The program was developed to help Irish citizens flee an economic crisis. Sabagh emphasized that the program also “was established for countries who have low levels of immigration to the US; it encourages them to migrate to the US.”
This program is a life-changing experience for immigrants and their children; it gives them the opportunity to experience the American Dream and of course would enhance our nation’s diversity. According to Muzaffar Chishti, director of the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute, “Diversity is a value in itself.”
After the recent terrorist attack in New York, committed by a recipient of the lottery program, President Trump and some Republicans called to end the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, proposing to accept immigrants on a merit basis only.
Sabagh commented “the fact that a terrorist comes in under this visa is not the issue, there are other people who come in on other visas and have done bad things. There have been two terrorists since the 1990s who came to the U.S. on a diversity visa, so the statistics don’t hold out.”
Sabagh explained that this is not the first attempt to eliminate the program and that there is a merit-based bill, the Cotton-Perdue RAISE Act “ that is not acceptable because it contains categories for merit-based immigration which eliminates the possibility for some people to enter the U.S.”
Furthermore, Sami Elmansoury, from the New York division of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, stated that merit is relative. Immigrants who are refugees trying to get to a country that takes them in. To him, that is also merit. He stated, “when we focus only on immigration and on one particular community or certain nations, we remove from the conversation an entire group of individuals who have contributed tremendously to our country.” It is counterintuitive to address terrorist attacks with immigration which is divisive and not unifying during times of an attack. It becomes tremendously problematic because it alienates the same individuals we should be welcoming.”
Photo: Sami Elmansoury
Eliminating this program would not only be ineffective to stop terrorist attacks, it would be exclusionary to many applicants who do not have education or opportunities in their home countries to immigrate on a merit basis. Moreover, the recipients of the Lottery Program undergo intense vetting before coming to the U.S. Elmansoury states that the Government Accountability Office found that those who entered the program “showed no documented evidence that DV immigrants from these, or other, countries posed a terrorist or other threat.” The terror incident in New York was the exception, not the rule for immigrants of the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, as a result, eliminating it would have been exclusionary and un-American.
Elmansoury concluded: “we pride ourselves that America is for all. So where is that beacon that we discuss all the time, the uplift of individuals in their time of need? This is the kind of moment that we should stand and say to all those individuals who are trying to do us harm that we will not allow them to change our values and who we are as Americans.”
