The Democrats’ Senate leader, N.Y. Sen. Chuck Schumer helped create the diversity visa program which reportedly provided a green card to the Islamic immigrant who allegedly killed eight New Yorkers on October 31.
The diversity visa program was created in 1990 by then-Rep. Schumer in response to Irish lobbies in his New York district. Twenty-seven years later, it annually awards 50,000 visas by annual lottery to entrants from around the world, ensuring a cascade of subsequent chain-migrants.
An August poll shows that only one-in-six Americans strongly favors the program, despite much political and media pressure to welcome migrants. Politico and Morning Consult conducted the poll of 1,992 registered voters, which showed:
Other polls show that the public strongly opposes elements of the program which offers green cards to people with few skills and little ability to assimilate into the United States’ non-Islamic society.
President Donald Trump and several GOP legislators, including Georgia Sen. David Perdue and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, has called for the diversity visa program to be ended. But the program is praised by progressives for imposing variety on Americans’ civic society. According to a progressive website, Qz.com:
Supporters believe the DV program, despite its relatively small size is essential in keeping the US a truly multicultural society by providing an opportunity for people from communities that aren’t largely represented in recent immigration flows to have a shot at America.
Schumer’s diversity visa plan was included in the House-approved “Family Unity and Employment Opportunity Immigration Act of 1990” when it was combined with a proposal by a Democratic from Boston. The resulting “Schumer visa” measure was included in the completed Immigration Act of 1990, which also raised the annual inflow of legal immigrants up from 500,000 up to 700,000. The bill was signed by then-President George H.W. Bush.
The diversity visa program offers green cards to 50,000 lottery applicants each year. Lottery winners undergo a State Department interview and health check, and can then bring their spouses and minor children to the United States and get them on a five-year track to citizenship.
Once a winner and a spouse become citizens, they can import their parents, their in-laws and their children, plus the parents of their in-laws, such as the winner’s spouse’s sister’s husband’s parents. In turn, the relatives can later become citizens and import their relatives. The chain-migration process does not set any skill tests for admission, and so delivers a growing flow of unskilled and uneducated — and often ill, elderly and retired migrants — to the nation’s extensive welfare system.
One of the Schumer-visa winners was Sayfulloh Saipov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan or neighboring Kyrgyzstan, who got his green card in 2010. He is reportedly the driver who killed eight New Yorkers — likely all of whom were Schumer’s constituents — by hitting them with a rented truck.
WABC-NY reports: “Authorities say he came to the United States seven years ago … under what is called the Diversity Visa Program, which offers a lottery for people from countries with few immigrants in America.”
Schumer’s support for greater immigration was also visible in 2013 when he joined and pushed the so-called “Gang of Eight” amnesty-and-cheap-labor bill.
That push proved disastrous to Schumer and the Democratic Party because it provided an impetus for New York real-estate developer Donald Trump to run for the presidency in 2016, and it also helped flip nine Democratic seats in the 2014 Senate elections.