President Donald Trump says his administration has “already started the process” of ending the Diversity Visa Lottery program, whereby 50,000 visas are randomly allotted every year to foreign nationals from a multitude of countries.
During a speech in Pensacola, Florida, Trump reaffirmed his opposition to the Visa Lottery, saying:
We want a system that is merit-based. They come in on merit, they don’t come in on a lottery system. How about the lottery system? Folks did you see that? That’s the guy in New York City. The lottery system where they put names in a bin… so what they do, I would say but more than just say, they take their worst and they put them in the bin and then when they pick the lottery, they have the real worst in their hands… and we end up getting them.
No more lottery system. We’re going to end that. We’ve already started the process.
We want people coming into our country who love our people, support our economy and embrace our values. It’s time to get our priorities straight.
Trump was referring to Uzbek national and alleged Islamic terrorist Sayfullo Saipov who entered the U.S. in 2010 through the Visa Lottery program. Saipov, in November, allegedly murdered eight individuals in New York City when he ran them over in the street using a rental car, police say.
As Breitbart News reported, Roughly 509,700 foreign nationals have entered the U.S. between 2005 to 2015 using the Visa Lottery program, not counting their spouses, children, and chain-migration relatives.
The U.S. has even brought in 25,976 co-nationals of suspected jihadi Sayfullo Saipov, despite their country of Uzbekistan being listed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency as a terrorist hotspot.
Requirements for foreign nationals to win the visa lottery are low, with the foreign national only needing a high school degree and two years of work experience. Despite the weak prerequisites needed to obtain the visa, foreign nationals obtain green cards to permanently stay in the U.S. and, after living in the country for five years, can become U.S. citizens and begin bringing their extended relatives to the country – a system known as “chain migration.”
Due to the process known as “chain migration” — whereby new immigrants to the U.S. are allowed to bring an unlimited amount of foreign relatives to the country with them, even if they do not have English-speaking skills, job skills, or cannot support themselves — Visa Lottery winners have been allowed to bring nearly four million of their foreign relatives with them to the U.S. since 1994, Breitbart News reported.
Every year, close to 200,000 chain migrants are brought in by prior-year lottery winners, adding to the huge legal and illegal immigrant population that now stands at a record 44 million. Every two new immigrants brings approximately seven foreign relatives with them.
Even if the lottery visa program is shut down in 2017, prior arrivals will continue to bring in more unscreened family chain-migrants unless the Congress also complies with President Trump’s call for an end to chain migration.
The visa lottery was created in 1990 by Democratic politicians, including Sen. Chuck Schumer — with support from the business-first wing of the GOP. Polls show broad public opposition to the unscreened immigration program.
Mass immigration via chain migration to the U.S. has led to negative impacts on the American public. For instance, every year four million blue-collar and white-collar Americans graduate from college but are thrown into a workforce where they must compete with nearly 1.5 million new illegal and legal immigrants who are admitted to the U.S. every year.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.