The US Government’s diversity visa lottery programme that allowed 55,000 applicants from other countries, especially developing countries to be selected at random and given residency in America is likely to be stopped, a report by the Washington Post says.
According to the report, in the contentious debate over immigration policy, three groups have dominated public and political attention: the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants seeking to become legal, the skilled foreign workers bound for high-tech jobs and relatives waiting to be reunited with their families.
Then there are those who won the green card lottery.
“This tiny visa programme, aimed at diversifying the pool of immigrants to the United States, selects 55,000 applicants at random each year. Unlike the other US visa programmes, it offers the “winners” and their spouses and children US residency with almost no strings attached. Although the odds of winning are infinitesimal, the programme is so wildly popular that last year almost eight?million people applied. And now it is likely to be quietly cut,” the publication said.
Under a Senate compromise, the programme would be eliminated and its visa slots would be subsumed into a broad system that stresses skills, education and other criteria for legal immigration, it indicated.
The report noted that senators who negotiated the proposed massive immigration change, which is being aired in a series of hearings, said the diversity programme crumbled under Republican insistence on finding more visas for skill-based immigrants.
“They said it also has lost appeal by shifting from its early goals. Launched in the early 1990s with a focus on Africa, the programme has recently brought in large numbers of people from countries including Albania, Nepal, Bangladesh and Iran,” it said.
However, defenders of the programme say it helps compensate for the lopsided history of legal immigration, long dominated by a few large countries with high-skilled workers, such as China and India, and those with strong family ties to the United States, such as Mexico and the Philippines. They also note that it creates wide international goodwill for the United States at a low cost, amounting to only 5 percent of legal immigrants, the publication said.
In 2010, Ghana was ranked number one in the world for winning that year’s Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery registered entries.
Out of the 8,752 Ghanaian registrants who won, more than 2,600 of them were interviewed, with about 2,400 of them issued with Diversity Visa in Accra.
Source: Ghana Business News
