Donald Trump’s overheated rhetoric has made immigration a central issue of this election. There is now a vigorous debate over what to do with America’s roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants. Neither conservatives nor liberals, however, have paid much attention to the need for reforming legal immigration. The system features many outdated and arcane laws, one of which is Ted Kennedy’s brainchild, the green card lottery.
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, as it’s formally known, is one of those government schemes whose name belies its origins. Sen. Kennedy got it added to the Immigration Act of 1990 to help a group of people who had been coming to America for centuries: the Irish. The “transition period” of the program, from 1992-94, dedicated 40 percent of “diversity” visas to Irish immigrants. That’s no longer the case, but Northern Ireland is still treated as a separate state under the law—important because immigrants from the United Kingdom, to which it belongs, are not eligible for the program.
Contrary to its name, there is even now no genuine sense in which the program promotes diversity among America’s immigrant population. Through the diversity lottery—”winners” are chosen at random from the applicant pool—the government grants 50,000 permanent residence visas each year. There is a catch, however: Only individuals from countries that have not sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States over the last five years are eligible to apply. This sounds like a good idea if the goal is to promote diversity. In practice, it doesn’t work that way. Unsurprisingly, larger countries tend to send more immigrants here. But the country thresholds apply on an absolute basis, rather than a per capita basis, so people from countries as diverse as Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, the Philippines, China, Canada, and the U.K. (among others) are barred from applying.
This makes little sense from a policy perspective. Imagine if the Philippines were to split up into a dozen countries. Would this make its population any more diverse? No. Yet after the split, the resulting countries’ native-born populations would be eligible for the diversity lottery. Rather than promoting “diversity,” then, the lottery merely favors immigrants from small countries over large ones.
What is even more ham-handed and bizarre is that the “country of origin,” for the purposes of determining eligibility, is overwhelmingly the country of birth, not the country of citizenship. Thus, if somebody born in the U.K. had spent the majority of her life in Trinidad and Tobago, as a citizen of that country, she would be ineligible to apply for a green card through the lottery program. People born in Trinidad who spent their lives in the U.K., on the other hand, could apply.
The other major problem with the green card lottery is that it has effectively no skills requirement. A person only needs either a high-school diploma or two years of work experience to be eligible to apply. Such a policy is not in the interest of the American taxpayer. Whereas immigrants with a college degree or higher level of education generate a net fiscal positive over the course of their lives, those with only a high school education end up receiving more in terms of benefits than they pay in taxes.
A 1997 study by the National Research Council estimated the net fiscal drain per capita for immigrants with only a high-school education at $31,000. Immigrants with higher levels of education provided a net fiscal benefit of $105,000 on average, over their lifetimes. Given the increasing premium education provides in the modern economy, this difference is bound to be even more striking today.
For several reasons then, the diversity lottery ought to be scrapped. In 2012, the Republican-majority House passed a bill that would dissolve the program and use those slots to grant permanent residence visas to immigrants with advanced degrees in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). The Democrat-controlled Senate blocked the legislation. Their stated reason for rejecting the bill was that the lottery program gives green cards to immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe who would not otherwise be eligible.
But it’s far from obvious that America has special obligations to promote immigration from those particular regions at the expense of others. Besides, the lottery excludes applicants from Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. Even if one could argue that we have special obligations towards those regions, why not promote skilled immigration from them? Given that skilled immigration benefits the economy much more than unskilled immigration, this strategy would much better serve American interests.
Getting immigration policy right is extremely important. The kind of labor force we welcome into America will determine the country’s trajectory for generations. Republicans, now in control of both the House and Senate, should try again soon to replace the diversity lottery with something more sensible and fair. In a turbulent election year, who knows what will happen come November?
Hrishikesh Joshi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.
