U.S. green card lottery

As we try to secure our borders against people who would do us harm, it is important to look at the legal ways that people can enter the United States.  Are you aware of the "diversity visa lottery?"  Here's the description on the State Department website:

The Congressionally mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program makes available 50,000 diversity visas (DV) annually, drawn from random selection among all entries to persons who meet strict eligibility requirements from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.

Of course an entire cottage industry has emerged to assist people in their application to the lottery.  Here is the pitch from the usagreencardlottery.org website:

Each year, 50,000 immigrant visas are made available through a lottery to people who come from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. None of these visas are available for people who come from countries that have sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the past five years. Anyone who is selected under this lottery will be given the opportunity to apply for permanent residence. If permanent residence is granted, then the individual will be authorized to live and work permanently in the United States. You will also be allowed to bring your spouse and any unmarried children under the age of 21 to the United States.

These applicants do not need to specify a reason they want to come to the U.S.  It is not necessary that they have a job lined up, or family in the U.S. to provide support. What they receive is a green card and an opportunity to apply for permanent residence.  You can see the results of the 2010 lottery here.  From Nigeria, 6,006.  From Iran, 2,773.  From Somalia, 229.  From Jordan, 143.  From Yemen, 72.

Do any of these countries sound familiar from recent news stories?

Congressmen Lamar Smith and Bob Goodlatte, sent a letter to the Chairman of the Judiciary committee, Congressman John Conyers, urging the committee to consider legislation eliminating the annual visa lottery.  Goodlatte has written legislation aimed at killing the lottery:

Though Umar Farouk Abdulmattallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian accused of trying to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day, used a tourist visa -- not a diversity visa -- to enter the country, Goodlatte said he worries that Al Qaeda members will game the system. He fears they will submit the names of young acolytes from Saudi Arabia or Yemen who have clean records and could gain entry to the U.S. to wreak havoc. More than 1,000 such visas have been granted to Yemenis in the past decade alone.



"You can take young people out of the madrassas that have no record of any activity with a terrorist organization but are loyal followers of Usama bin Laden," he said.


The State Department's Office of the Inspector General recommended in a 2003 report that terror-sponsoring nations be removed from the diversity visa program.


"OIG believes that this program contains significant vulnerabilities to national security as hostile intelligence officers, criminals and terrorists attempt to use it to enter the United States as permanent residents," the office's deputy inspector testified to Congress in 2004.


A separate report filed by the Government Accountability Office also faulted the program for being susceptible to widespread fraud. A cottage industry has emerged abroad to cater to the lottery, and it regularly bilks people out of massive amounts of money and even coerces some into marriage to keep their diversity visas.


But State Department officials told FoxNews.com that they have a powerful security protocol in place to protect the system -- a point underscored in their rebuttal to the GAO report.


"We do not see the DV (diversity visa) program as uniquely vulnerable," when it comes to state sponsors of terrorism, they said, because of careful vetting that includes "two types of biometric checks and name checks."

Like the checks used when Umar Farouk Abdulmattallab applied for and received a tourist visa?  The very existence of this program demonstrates to our would-be attackers that the U.S. is not serious about protecting our homeland.