'Visa Lottery' Brought in 30,000 People from Terror-Funding Nations Since 2007

NEW YORK CITY, New York — The United States’ visa lottery has brought in nearly 30,000 foreign nationals from foreign countries designated by the State Department as state-sponsors of terrorism during the last decade.

Since 2007, 28,783 foreign nationals from Iran, Syria and Sudan — three countries which support international terrorism — have become legal immigrants into the United States through the visa lottery, according to new State Department data.

Under the lottery program, championed by former Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the U.S. randomly gives out 50,000 visas every year to foreign nationals from a multitude of countries, including those with known terrorism problems – such as Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Yemen, and Uzbekistan. Winners have undergone only minor screening from immigration officials, even when their ideology is hostile to Americans laws and culture.

The U.S. has brought in nearly 21,000 Iranian nationals, 2,732 Sudanese nationals and 812 Syrian nationals on the Visa Lottery — not counting subsequent chain-migration of additional unscreened people from those countries — even though all three countries are listed as state-sponsors of terrorism.

Over the last half-decade between 2012 and 2016, as Breitbart News reported, 72,794 foreign nationals have come to the U.S. on the Visa Lottery from countries that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has designated as terrorist-sponsors.

In 2016 alone, more than 15,600 foreign nationals entered the U.S. from terrorist-sponsored countries. Those countries included Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Algeria.

Since 2005, Breitbart News reported, more than half a million foreign nationals have come to the U.S. by randomly winning the Visa Lottery, bringing with them a chain migration of five million foreign nationals since 1994, according to researchers at the Center for Immigration Studies.

The Visa Lottery has come under most recent scrutiny by pro-American immigration reformers and President Trump after it was revealed that 29-year-old Sayfullo Saipov — the man who allegedly mowed down pedestrians in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City — entered the U.S. in 2010 from Uzbekistan through the Visa Lottery before obtaining a Green Card to permanently stay in the country.

Every year, more than 1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants are admitted to the U.S., with the current foreign-born population booming to an unprecedented high of roughly 44 million individuals. Mass immigration to the U.S. has been at the expense of American workers in the working and middle-class who have been forced to compete with foreign labor while their wages have remained stagnant.