It’s Time To Shelve The Diversity Immigrant Visa

[Da Lat]

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By Anony Mee
Oct. 20, 2025

Congress just loves to tinker with immigration law. Now, it needs some more tinkering because the Diversity Immigrant Visa (aka the “Visa Lottery”) has met and exceeded its goals. While the numbers on paper are small, it’s a magnet for many of the immigration problems we see today.

A hundred years ago, US immigration law favored Europeans and established a quota system and numerical limitations. Starting in the 1960s, our current preference system (immediate relatives, family preference, employment preference) was introduced. Immigrants surged from Latin America and Asia. In the mid-1980s, proto-diversity visas were allocated primarily to the Irish and Italians.

The Immigration Act of 1990 created today’s Diversity Immigrant Visa category (DV) for nationals of countries that are not the largest sources of immigrants to the US, with selection via a lottery among entrants. In FY 2025, the nationals of only 19 countries were excluded from the program. This green card lottery is numerically limited to 55,000 visas (the entrant plus eligible accompanying relatives) annually.

Since 1990, DVs have averaged around 50,000 issuances per year. That’s on top of around one million immigrant visas issued to immediate relatives of American citizens, other family members of citizens and green card holders, and employment-based permanent immigrants. The President, via Congress, sets the number of refugees that can be admitted every year. There is no legal limitation on the number of those who can be granted asylum.

The 1.8 million or so multicultural immigrants admitted from nearly every country on earth over the 36 years of the DV program is dwarfed by the approximately 20 million ineligibles allowed in during President Biden’s four years in office. The apprehended illegal border crossers alone came from more than 160 of the world’s 195 countries. Then there were the “got aways” not apprehended, those covered under the questionable expansion of the Temporary Protected Status designations, and unlawful humanitarian parole via the CBP-1 program. Plus, the millions who showed up at the border, falsely crying asylum or claiming to be joining relatives, were routinely admitted.

The DV program, I believe, exacerbated the number of folks coming illegally to the US these past few years. There are millions upon millions of entrants into this program, from nearly 7 million to more than 22 million, depending on the year, plus another 50% of family members. (That is, not people entering America, but people getting their name into the program.) Of these millions, about 33,000 immigrant visas are issued to primary lottery entrants and another 10-12,000 to their immediate family members who will accompany them. Only around 0.165% of entrants obtain a visa.

Look at the billions of lottery tickets sold in the US every year. Each ticket holder has dreams of hitting the jackpot and what they could do with all that money.

It is no different for the participants in the visa lottery program. We have been stoking the world’s dream of living forever in the United States for 35 years. That’s enough to have created this overwhelming attempt to get here legally. With such an infinitesimal chance of achieving that dream, this program crosses the border from a wonderful opportunity into being both unfair and downright mean. It can lend itself to massive frustration and efforts on the part of disappointed program entrants to find other ways to achieve a dream we ourselves fostered in them.

The bungee effect of the program cannot be overestimated. Once a family has moved to the United States, their larger family, their friends, their neighborhoods, and their communities have a toehold here. It’s a way to enter our country with friendly assistance already in place. This has a very powerful drawing effect, which is why we saw people from nearly every country risking their lives and their fortunes to sneak across our borders. They all had a place to go.

The amount of fraud uncovered during the DV program’s tenure is almost impossible to imagine. That’s what holding that impossible dream out to people will accomplish: They’ll do anything to try to get that visa.

More than 20 years ago, I was in charge of visa operations at a very large DV-issuing post. Just by accident, I noted a commonality among a couple of the fraudulent applications among the winners from our country.

I dug deeper into the worldwide DV database and uncovered thousands of fraudulent entries for our country alone, and I know I only caught a fraction of them. I shared my findings with neighboring colleagues. They found tens of thousands. Subsequently, there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fraudulent entries with similar characteristics discovered that used this particular method of falsifying identities for entry. Senior officials testified before Congress on the level and cost of fraud that had to be battled in this program. Very little changed.

The 2027 DV program has been postponed by the Trump Administration. They’ve recently added a registration fee of $1 to enter the program, and now require that the entrant’s and family members’ passport numbers be included with the entry. This is to both help cover the costs of the registration part of this program and to deter the use of fraudulent identities. No start date has yet been announced. There should be no DV program this year, or ever again.

There is now a critical enough mass of immigrants from everywhere on earth present in our country. If they want to petition for the spouses and minor children they left behind, they may do so. If they want to be joined by parents, siblings, and adult children, plus the spouses and children of those relatives, lawful permanent aliens can naturalize and then start filing petitions for them. If foreigners want to come here to work, they simply need to hone their skills in selected professions and apply.

We should hang on to the DV database, though. Entrants have been required to be high school graduates or have two years of work experience in a profession designated by the Department of Labor. If we find we are critically short of certain professions, and Mike Rowe is unable to identify all we need from US sources, DV might come to the rescue. I’m sure DOGE over at the Department of Labor could create an algorithm to scan the DV database for those we’d like to invite to come and work in the US.

I’m encouraged by the Trump Administration’s efforts and successes in deportation and self-deportation of illegal aliens these past few months. It will take much longer to be rid of not just those that came in under Biden, but the approximately 20 million illegals already present before he took office.

Congressional desire more than a generation ago for a more geographically diverse population has been met and then some. The DV program should be halted. It should be cancelled in its entirety, but postponing it for a few years would be better than nothing.


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Source: American Thinker
Link: https://www.americanthinker.com/arti...rant_visa.html






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