The Diversity Visa Lottery Leaves Immigration Up to Chance. End It.

Originally published by the Washington Examiner

Two questions dominating the immigration debate for decades can be summed up as: who should America allow in, and how many should come? There are unlimited answers to these two questions, but the most unreasonable and irresponsible response would be for our government to leave it up to random chance.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what Congress did through the creation of the Diversity Visa Lottery, putting our nation’s population growth at the service of a random lottery allocation. With the Trump administration’s mandate to restore American interests as the primary focus of immigration policy, we have a significant opportunity to reverse course.

For years, the Diversity Visa Lottery has worked by randomly selecting applicants from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States. The list of low rate countries changes year-to-year and is based on whether or not the country has had 50,000 natives immigrate to the United States in the past five years.

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