What do the following immigrants have in common?
Hesham Hedayet, an Egyptian national who gunned down several people, killing two, before being killed himself during an attack on the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airporton July 4, 2002.
Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbekistan national who drove a truck down the Hudson River Bike Path in Manhattan on Halloween 2017, killing eight and critically injuring many others, including a 14-year-old, who was sentenced to life for the attack, carried out in the name of ISIS.
Claudio Neves Valente, the Portuguese national who’s alleged to have carried out the mass shooting last Saturday at Brown University, and to have shot and killed MIT Prof. Nuno Loureiro, also from Portugal, on Monday.
The answer: They all received green cards through a 1990s program specifically created to bring foreign nationals with no family and no ties to the United States to this country and place them on a path to citizenship, all in the name of “diversifying” the immigrant pool.
As if there’s something so wrong, inequitable, or unfair about a system that favors newcomers with a job or a family here (the “normal” avenues for immigration) before they arrive that it had to be subverted in the name of “diversity.”
Congress created the lottery in 1990, and more than 22 million qualified entrants applied for the “DV-2024” program alone, the last available statistic.
From that pool, up to 50,000 winners will be chosen, “apportioned among . . . six geographic regions to ensure a maximum of seven percent are issued to persons chargeable to any single country.”
Nobody wants a pot of “non-diverse” diversity lottery winners, after all.
Winners are “randomly” chosen through a computer-generated process, though to be fair winning the lottery didn’t simply allow them to immediately come to the United States.
Instead, they then had to apply to receive a visa to enter, following what’s always promised to be a vigorous “vetting” and “screening” process.
Which begs the question of how much the United States knows — or can really find out — about individuals from far-flung corners of the globe who, in most cases, have no connections here.
Of those 22-million-plus “qualified” applicants for the DV-2024 program, for example, more than 5,000 were Iranian nationals.
Do we expect the mullahs, in the smoking ruins of their erstwhile nuclear program, to be generous with derogatory information about any of them?
More than 5,500 were from Uzbekistan, lumped in under the “Europe” geographical region with Belgium and Italy.
Who’s available in Tashkent to scour local police records, looking for disqualifying arrests and convictions?
In 2005, the then-State Department Inspector General told the House Judiciary Committee that the visa lottery “contains significant risks to national security from hostile intelligence officers, criminals, and terrorists attempting to use the program for entry into the United States as permanent residents.”
Subsequent safeguards were implemented, which is fine — except, again, the program almost exclusively benefits aliens with no connections and no loyalty to the United States, its values and its institutions.
The prevailing attitude among immigration decision-makers seems to have been that there are no foreign nationals abroad with malign intents — just future hardworking “Americans” we haven’t met yet.
Even today many believe the real “bad actors” are the immigration officers working to find and deport unauthorized aliens, not the aliens themselves — even when “progressive” local officials cut them loose so ICE can’t get them and they allegedly commit murder.
The “Diversity Visa” program is a lottery alright. The problem is that the odds are stacked against Americans.
After the Brown and MIT killer was found, Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, said President Donald Trump was pausing the visa program. That’s a start — but it’s up to Congress to shut it down completely.
It’s time to end this three-decade gamble with our national security and community safety.
Andrew Arthur is the fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
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