Ditch the green-card lottery
Reallocate 55,000 visas to employment-based programs.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have called for an increase in visas for skilled immigrants, angering some of President-elect Trump’s supporters. According to the two entrepreneurs, the U.S. has too few skilled workers, and our outdated immigration system is to blame. Democrats have mostly sat on the sidelines during this debate, but they shouldn’t. They should take a page out of Mr. Trump’s “The Art of the Deal" and make an offer of their own: Ditch the green-card lottery and increase the number of employment-based visas granted every year.
The lottery, formally known as the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, provides up to 55,000 immigrant visas annually. It aims to attract applicants from countries with otherwise low immigration rates to the U.S. Unlike most visa programs, it requires no job offer or familial tie for entry. Two years of work experience or a high-school diploma suffices, and the winners are chosen at random.
When the diversity visa was created in 1980, it wasn’t for altruistic reasons. It was more of a political boondoggle. Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants were flocking to the U.S. Many didn’t qualify for amnesty or employment green cards. Irish-American congressmen offered a solution: the diversity green card.
In its early stages about 40% of the lottery winners were Irish. In Ireland and the U.S., community leaders organized application parties where attendees filled out applications, sometimes creating hundreds of forms for a single applicant. The Irish government even chartered planes to deliver applications to Washington.
Today, no country dominates the selection process, but fraud still abounds. Meanwhile, the U.S. is suffering from a backlog of employment-based green-card cases. Some 1.8 million skilled foreigners with job offers are waiting to receive visas, and only 140,000 are granted each year.
Reallocating all 55,000 diversity visas to the employment-based program would reduce this backlog. Doing so wouldn’t totally solve the problem, but it would open a conversation about the type of larger reform necessary to get those 1.8 million workers here faster.
This reform will require bipartisan agreement. Fortunately, Democrats are well-positioned to begin the conversation. In 2013 a bipartisan group of senators—dubbed the Gang of Eight—proposed a comprehensive immigration bill that would have done away with the green-card lottery. In the years that followed, this was a popular position among Democrats and Republicans alike. It was only during a period of reflexive opposition to Mr. Trump that many Democrats changed their views on the lottery.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus support the lottery as a path for Africans to gain citizenship. But Nigeria, the most populous African country, hasn’t qualified for it in over a decade. If Democrats again become willing to ditch the green-card lottery, real reform to the legal immigration system can happen.
Close to a billion people would immigrate to the U.S. every year, if they could. As Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “The only title in our democracy superior to that of president is the title of citizen." Why do we treat this privilege as if it were a prize in a raffle?
Mr. Richardson is an immigration lawyer and a former foreign service officer.
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