By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--November 2, 2017
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The program's defenders claim that the "lottery winners" who get into the United States via the diversity visa program are vetted as stringently as anyone else. But is anyone really vetted all that stringently at all?
Obviously you can't predict the future, and anyone can surprise you, but the whole point of the travel bans Derrick Watson keeps halting is that we're trying to find a more effective way to do the vetting. Maybe if we can figure that our, we won't keep letting the likes of Sayfullo Saipov into the country:Trump said on Wednesday he would ask Congress to “immediately” initiate efforts to kill the program, and Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, who has long called for an end to diversity visas, said in a statement that they pose “a threat to the safety of our citizens.” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer helped create the program in 1990 when he was a member of the House of Representatives. But he was also part of a group of lawmakers in 2013 who crafted a bipartisan immigration bill that would have done away with the program. That bill was passed by the Senate but was killed by the Republican-led House. Top congressional Democrats on Wednesday defended the program, saying it subjects all visa recipients “to the same stringent vetting as all other immigrant visa programs.” The only other known instance of a diversity visa beneficiary carrying out a deadly terrorist attack in the United States occurred in 2002. That year, an Egyptian man who had received a diversity visa through his wife years earlier shot and killed two people in a Los Angeles airport. The man had earlier sought asylum in the United States but was rejected. Ultimately, he was allowed to stay in the country after his wife won the lottery.
As early as 2004, the State Department’s then-deputy inspector general, Anne Patterson, told Congress her office believed the diversity program “contains significant vulnerabilities to national security” and that terrorists could “attempt to use it to enter the United States as permanent residents.” The agency watchdog recommended barring citizens of countries that sponsor terrorism from the program. Over the years, government audits have exposed sophisticated fraud schemes targeting the program, including extortion rackets, sham marriages and the use of fake identification documents.So Democrats defend it because it's just as effective as all other immigrant visa programs, which I guess means they're all subject to fraud schemes like this one is. There is nothing wrong with "diversity" in the abstract, but when you're making it a priority unto itself, over and above national security, you're asking for trouble like this. It may very well be true that Saipov was radicalized after he arrived in the U.S., but who's to say we couldn't have discovered something about him that would have indicated he was open to such radicalization? I have never been a strident immigration restrictionist, and for the most part I don't believe that Americans who can't find jobs are struggling because immigrants are taking their jobs. If you've got something to offer and you're relentless enough about seeking the opportunity, you'll find one. But that doesn't change the fact that there's no inherent right anyone has to immigrate into the United States. You should have to demonstrate you're a good candidate to come here, rather than simply "winning a lottery." If this is as serious as U.S. immigration officials are taking national security, it's no wonder things like this keep happening.
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