Why a Green Card Lottery Makes No Sense for a Serious Country

Think about the other things the United States government does. It chooses astronauts by a long, grueling selection. It picks Army Rangers by a course designed to wash out most of the people who try. It fills the federal bench by nomination, hearing and a vote. It even picks the people who may serve on a jury through an elaborate process of questioning, because we understand that who is in the room matters. Now think about how it picks a slice of the people who will become permanent residents and, eventually, citizens. It runs a raffle.

I am not exaggerating for effect, folks, though I will happily exaggerate for effect later. There is a federal program, written into law, in which a computer draws names at random from a pool of entrants, and the winners get a chance at a green card. Nobody scored them. Nobody ranked them. Nobody decided that their skills, their family ties or their commitment to the country made them the right choice. The machine picked a number. If we ran the Marine Corps this way, the Commandant would be out of a job by Friday.

How the Diversity Visa works

Let me lay out the mechanics fairly, because the program is real and its defenders are not cartoon characters.

The program is formally called the Diversity Immigrant Visa. It was created by the Immigration Act of 1990, which was a bipartisan overhaul signed by President George H. W. Bush. The law set aside a share of annual immigrant visas for people from countries that had sent relatively few immigrants to the United States in the preceding five years. The yearly allotment is generally described as 55,000 visas. A later law, passed to help people displaced by wars in Central America, redirected up to 5,000 of those each year, so the number available to the lottery in practice is about 50,000.

Here are the rules that matter.

• Who can enter. A person must be a native of a qualifying country, one whose recent immigration to the United States was low. Countries that sent more than 50,000 immigrants over the previous five years are left off the list, which is why natives of the largest sending countries cannot apply in the same way.
• What a winner must have. The law requires a high school education or its equivalent, or two years of work experience within the past five years in an occupation that requires at least two years of training or experience. That is the entire qualification test.
• How the draw works. The State Department runs the registration each year, entry is free, and a computer randomly selects names, with selections spread across world regions. A selection is not a visa. The winner still has to apply, be interviewed at a consulate, and pass the normal medical and security screening, and the number of visas is capped, so some selectees get nothing if the cap is reached first.
• A per-country ceiling. No single country may take more than seven percent of the visas in a year, which keeps the program from being dominated by one nation.

That is the program. It is not a conspiracy. It is a statute, and statutes are subject to argument.

The odd history of the idea

The lottery did not come from nowhere. In the 1980s, Congress had already experimented with programs aimed at countries that were underrepresented in the post-1965 immigration flow. The 1965 reforms had shifted the system toward family-based admission, and that tended to favor countries that already had large communities in America. People from places like Ireland and parts of Europe found themselves with few relatives to sponsor them. Congress tried transitional programs in the late 1980s, and then settled on a permanent one in 1990, adding the lottery as the mechanism for distributing the visas fairly among many applicants from many nations.

That history matters, because the defense of the program is rooted in a real complaint: the family system had gotten so lopsided that it narrowed who could come. The defender says the lottery was a way to open a window for people who had no sponsor and no employer. I understand the instinct. The problem is the fix.

Premise one: a country should choose, and a lottery does not choose

Let me turn to the argument, with numbered premises, in good debating order, though I intend to enjoy it.

1. Immigration policy is a set of choices about who joins the national family. Every admission category carries a reason. A spouse of a citizen is admitted because marriage is a bond the law respects and because families belong together. A worker is admitted because an employer has shown a need that the labor market could not fill, and because skills raise the output of the economy. A refugee is admitted because the person is fleeing persecution, and the country has made a moral promise to shelter such people. Each reason can be debated, and each can be defended or rejected. Those are choices.
2. The lottery's only reason is that it does not have one. The winner is admitted because the winner won. The qualification bar, a high school diploma or two years of work experience, is a floor that millions of people clear. Among the pool of entrants who clear it, nothing separates the person who will start a company from the person who will not, the person who will learn English from the one who will not, or the person who loves the Constitution from the one who has not read it. The draw ignores all of it on purpose.
3. A policy with no reason cannot be judged by whether it achieves its purpose. The lottery's stated purpose is diversity of origin. That purpose, taken at face value, is a statement about the winner's country, not the winner. It treats the birthplace as the qualification. Conservatives, of all people, should object to deciding membership in the American family by the accident of where someone was born, because our whole tradition says that what counts is what a person has committed to, not where he started.

That third premise is where the lottery runs into the American creed. We say that anyone can become an American by embracing the founding principles. Then we pick some of the newcomers by a spin of the wheel and by their passport, and we pay no attention to whether they have embraced anything.

The steelman: it diversifies the flow

Let me give the defenders their best argument, in words they would accept.

The family-based system, they say, tilts toward countries with large existing immigrant communities, so a person from a country with few emigrants has almost no path in. The lottery opens a door for them. Diversity is good for the country: it brings new languages, new perspectives, and a broader range of talents. Winners are screened for security, health and criminal history like everyone else, so the lottery does not lower the standards for admission. And since the pool of entrants is huge compared with the visas available, the program is more of a sweepstakes of hope than a threat to anyone. Besides, the argument continues, the randomness is a feature, because it prevents the system from becoming a patronage machine for officials who pick favorites.

I take two of those points seriously. Security screening applies to lottery winners as to everyone else, and I will not pretend otherwise. And random selection does prevent a particular kind of corruption: nobody can bribe a computer to pick a cousin, at least not as easily as he could bribe an official.

The rebuttal, point by point

Here is why the argument does not carry the day.

One: the cure for a lopsided family system is to fix the family system. If the complaint is that the existing categories leave out whole regions, then change the categories. Congress can set per-country rules, reform the family preferences, rebalance employment visas, and write a merit-based channel. Adding a raffle on the side concedes that the main system is broken and then declines to repair it.

Two: diversity of origin is not a skill, a tie or a need. The program's justification is that variety in the national origins of newcomers is itself a benefit. That is a claim of cultural enrichment, and I accept that new arrivals can enrich a country. But the argument proves too much. If the point is enrichment, then enrichment is better served by picking the applicants who are most likely to enrich: those with skills, capital, language ability, or family who will help them settle. A random draw among eligible applicants enriches no better than any other sample of the eligible.

Three: the screening bar is low by design. A high school education is a reasonable floor for a country with universal secondary schooling. As a ceiling for selection, it is a joke. The lottery does not ask whether the winner can support himself, speak English, or has a job to go to, and it does not weigh the winner against the millions of other people who also want a green card and who have a sponsor, a skill or a persecuted past to offer. It is the only major category in which the entire evaluation is "did the computer like your number."

Four: it competes with categories that have a reason. Every year the country has a fixed overall framework for permanent admissions, and those numbers are scarce. The family-sponsored preference categories have a floor of 226,000 a year, and employment-based categories have a base of 140,000 a year, and both have long waiting lists for applicants from several countries. The roughly 50,000 diversity visas are not dropped from the sky. They are numbers the country chose to allocate to a raffle rather than to someone in a queue. Arithmetic: 50,000 divided by 140,000 is a little over 0.35, so the lottery's allotment is about thirty-six percent the size of the entire base employment-based allotment. Think about what it would mean for the economy if we handed that many more slots to the engineers, nurses, and researchers waiting in line, and think about what it says that we gave them to a draw instead.

Five: a policy that rewards an application form rewards the people who game it. Because entry is free and winning requires only luck, the draw invites fraud and exploitation, the kind where middlemen charge hopeful people money to "improve their chances," which they cannot. Everyone in the process knows that, and everyone in the process has learned to live with it. A selection scheme that attracts scammers is a selection scheme that is telling you something.

What a merit or family alternative would do

Imagine the program ended and the numbers went elsewhere. I am labeling this a hypothetical, because Congress would have to decide, but the choices are not hard to picture.

• Merit. Shift the visas toward employment-based categories, particularly the backlogged ones, and toward a points system that rewards skills, English, age, and a job offer. What an American Points System Would Look Like Written Into Law describes what such a system looks like on paper, and Should the H-1B Lottery Give Way to Picking the Highest-Paid Offers First makes the parallel point about another program that picks by chance.
• Family. Concentrate the family categories on the closest relatives: spouses, minor children and parents. The Case for Nuclear-Family Immigration Over Extended Family Chains argues for exactly that, and the numbers freed by ending a lottery could clear a backlog of people who have already followed the rules.
• Both. The country could split the number. Whatever combination Congress chose, each of those visas would go to a person selected for a reason that could be written down and defended in public.

The Senate even voted to end the lottery in 2013 as part of a broad immigration bill, which passed that chamber and was not taken up by the House. That fact is worth remembering because it shows how little partisanship the issue deserves: eliminating the program was part of a bipartisan package, and the people who supported it were not all conservatives.

The Founding test

Let me measure all this against the founding principles, in the constitutionalist's spirit.

The Constitution gives Congress the power "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization." The word that matters is rule. A rule has criteria. It is a standard that a representative body adopted, can explain to the voters, and can revise when it fails. A lottery is the opposite of a rule in the sense the Founders meant: it substitutes chance for judgment, which is the one thing representative government is for. When the people's representatives choose who becomes a permanent resident, they are doing something the Constitution assigns to them, and the people can hold them to account. When they delegate the choice to a random number generator, nobody is accountable for the result, because nobody made the choice.

There is a moral point as well, and it should make a conservative more uneasy than any fiscal argument. Membership in a political community is not a prize. It is a mutual commitment, a promise by the newcomer to uphold the country's laws and a promise by the country to treat the newcomer as one of its own. Giving it away by a raffle cheapens the thing that we want newcomers to value. It is bad civics before it is bad economics.

The grown-up way to handle it

The grown-up approach is simple. End the lottery, say honestly why, and reallocate its numbers by statute to categories that can justify themselves in public. Keep the legitimate goal of openness to the world by building it into categories that favor skills, family and commitment. And be fair to the people who entered the lottery in good faith, by phasing the change in with notice so that nobody is left holding a selection letter and a promise the country decided to break.

Nothing here is hostile to immigrants. It is hostile to chance as a method of selection. A country that is confident about what it asks of newcomers does not mind saying so. It asks for skills, ties and commitment, and it chooses on purpose.

The case in brief

1. The Diversity Visa, created by the Immigration Act of 1990, distributes roughly 50,000 green cards a year by random draw among eligible entrants who hold a high school education or two years of qualifying work.
2. Every other admission category has a reason: family, employment, or protection. The lottery's only reason is the birthplace of the winner, which is the wrong criterion for a nation defined by commitment.
3. The strongest defense, that it diversifies a family-weighted system, is better met by reforming the system itself than by adding a raffle.
4. Those visas, about thirty-six percent of the base employment-based allotment, could instead clear backlogs for workers and close family who have followed the rules.
5. Congress is constitutionally responsible for the rule of naturalization, and choosing newcomers by chance is a way of declining that responsibility.

What you can do: look up your own representative on the representatives page and ask whether the office supports ending the Diversity Visa and reallocating its numbers by merit or family categories.