Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” conservative commentator Michelle Malkin slammed Republicans and Democrats in Congress for failing to end the so-called diversity visa lottery program, an immigration policy that’s been under fire for being exploited by foreign terror suspects.
Malkin attacked the GOP-led Congress for not having already ended the visa lottery, where 50,000 visas are randomly given out to foreign nationals from a multitude of countries. Those countries include ones with known terrorist problems, such as Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Yemen, and Uzbekistan.
Partial transcript as follows:
There are millions of people around the world who are clamoring to get in here the right way and the fact that we still do it randomly tells you how much insanity — politically incorrect sanity — has set in. I mean, it was just seven weeks ago with the truck jihadist, who also got in here through the Diversity Visa Lottery and also benefitted from the chain migration insanity that we had people saying ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got to get rid of it! We’ve got to get rid of it!’And I’m so exasperated my friends because I’ve been calling for the end of this program for the last 15 years.
We should value citizenship and entry into this country much more than we have been and both parties have shrugged their shoulders. There have been legislative bills, stand-alone bills, to eliminate the Diversity Visa program for the last 15 years. They’ve gathered dust. The SAFE Act, before the House Judiciary Committee in 2011, just sat there doing nothing. We’ve got the RAISE Act, which is co-sponsored by Tom Cotton and David Perdue, which would have eliminated the Visa Lottery program. It’s been gathering dust. How many more people have to die or be threatened before we get rid of this stupidity?
This week it was revealed that 27-year-old Akayed Ullah, a Bangladesh national accused of injuring three individuals when he allegedly tried to detonate a suicide bomb in New York City in a planned terrorist attack, had arrived in the United States in 2011 as a “chain migrant” of his uncle who had previously come to the country through the visa lottery.
Chain migration allows new immigrants to the United States to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives with them.
Under the visa lottery system, 14,869 Bangladeshi nationals entered the U.S. between 2007 and 2012, as Breitbart News reported.
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