Why and how to come up with a lottery with green cards

In the mid-1980s, there was an “Irish problem” in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of migrants from Ireland flocked to the United States to escape the economic crisis. Few of them had relatives or jobs in America that would make them eligible to apply for a green card. Many of the Irish simply came on tourist visas and remained in the US illegally. It was for the sake of migrants from Ireland that they opened a lottery for obtaining a green card, he says The Washington Post.

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The lottery, invented almost 40 years ago to help the Irish, has now become a global operation, involving millions of people every year, and 50 thousand lucky ones every year are entitled to live in the United States. The lottery mainly attracts people from Africa and Eastern Europe.

There have been several years of talk about ending the lottery, but the program is still open, having survived several rejected bills to cancel it.

Historians have mixed feelings about the idea of ​​ending the “era” of green card lotteries. Anna Lowe, a professor of political science at CUNY Brooklyn College, said she “wouldn’t cry” if the lottery was eliminated. She notes that the problem that the lottery ultimately solved was created by the Immigration Act of 1965, which eliminated the quota system and prioritized family reunification and attracting skilled workers to the country.

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Due to the 1965 Act, the number of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and other Western European countries has decreased. Instead, increased immigration from Asia and Latin America.

“Before 1965, the visa process was quite simple and virtually any man or woman from Ireland could immigrate without difficulty,” says Lowe. — After 1965, the situation for the Irish worsened significantly. They had difficulty finding enough close relatives in the United States to apply for an immigrant visa.”

By the early 1980s, Ireland was hitting hard by the economic crisis. Unable to legally immigrate, hundreds of thousands of Irish people came to America as tourists and then expired their visas.

“About 150 Irish came to the United States and remained in the country illegally,” the New York Times wrote in 1988.

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In 1986, Republican Party spokesman Brian J. Donnelly proposed an amendment to the Immigration Reform Act that would randomly allocate 10 visas to countries affected by the 1965 Act. The amendment was soon adopted, and the Irish, who were in the United States illegally, received legal status in a short time. In the first lottery, the Irish won 4 visas out of 161 available.

In 1995, the green card lottery became as we know it. In it, 50 thousand winners are selected at random. The number of Irish people who won the lottery gradually decreased. They were losing ground to people from India, China and Mexico. Now the level of immigration from these countries is so high that they are often banned from participating in the lottery (the list of countries that are not allowed to participate differs from year to year).

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