Student Union
Will Green Cards Be Cut in Half?
Sure, the likelihood of getting the Diversity Immigrant Visa is slim — about 0.3 percent. But 14 million applicants try to win one of about 50,000 spots in the Green Card lottery each year.
As of early February, though, the diversity visa is once again facing an uncertain future. Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia proposed a bill ending it, in addition to dramatically cutting the number of other legal immigrants and refugees allowed every year.
A similar bill in the House of Representatives narrows the scope, only proposing to end the diversity visa.
The 22-year-old visa lottery has been threatened before in legislation sponsored by Republicans and Democrats as recently as last year. But it never became law.
Now with a Republican-controlled Congress and a president who has focused on immigration, the program is again at risk with the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act.
In a statement announcing the bill, the senators claimed it will “help raise American workers' wages.”
"We are taking action to fix some of the shortcomings in our legal immigration system," Perdue said. "Returning to our historically normal levels of legal immigration will help improve the quality of American jobs and wages."
Research has shown that the connection between jobs for Americans and immigration is tenuous. But there are other arguments against the lottery program.
For one, the program is susceptible to fraud, both by and against applicants, as the U.S. General Accountability Office found a decade ago.
The State Department improved the application to reduce the number of people who submit multiple applications in the same year, which is an automatic disqualification. Also, it alerts applicants that the lottery is free, and businesses charging a fee to submit lottery applications on applicants' behalf is illegal.
At its core, the diversity lottery was designed — as the name suggests — to diversify the immigrant stream to the U.S. from countries with lower immigration rates. When a country sends more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. in five years, they are excluded from the eligibility list.
Natives of Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Peru, South Korea, the United Kingdom (excepting Northern Ireland), and Vietnam were excluded from the most recent round of applications.
For applicants who don’t have a family or employer sponsor in the U.S., or who aren’t refugees, the Green Card lottery is the only option.
The lottery is a small portion of immigration to the U.S. every year, but larger than employment-based immigrant visas. In Fiscal Year 2015, the U.S. issued about 48,000 diversity visas out of 531,000 immigrant visas.
Carolien Hardenbol, a diversity visa recipient from the Netherlands, moved to the U.S. in the late 1990s with her husband as new parents with advanced degrees and a sense of adventure. Uncertain they would be sponsored for permanent residency through work, they applied for the diversity lottery — and her husband won.
"I envisioned this big hat where these envelopes were drawn,” she joked.
What started as a volunteer position with Sanctuary for Families, a nonprofit organization in New York that provides legal services to victims of domestic violence and human trafficking, turned into a career for Hardenbol. After getting her legal permanent residency, she became co-director of the Immigration Intervention Project there.
"Without diversity there would be no United States of America," says Hardenbol.
Do fewer immigrants mean more jobs for Americans?
The bill’s announcement follows a series of executive orders by President Donald Trump targeting immigrants, which have been met with lawsuits and protests.
It also reflects the policy suggestions of some groups who want to restrict immigration. Reducing or ending the diversity visa has been a platform for groups who want reduce immigration to the U.S.
The RAISE Act calls for cuts in family preference visas, refugee admissions, and the diversity lottery, while only adding a new W visa, to allow the foreign-born parents of adult U.S. citizens to visit for renewable five-year periods, without a path to citizenship or work approval.
Some immigration supporters say the 50,000 visas could be better used.
Florida-based immigration attorney John Gihon supports ending the diversity lottery, but only in favor of making more family visas available and creating a different opportunity for highly trained immigrants.
“People with degrees in STEM subjects, medicine, nursing, etc, that we know will provide them with an opportunity to find work and contribute to the country should not be denied the green cards simply because there is currently no employer to sponsor them and give them a job,” says Gihon.
Tekleab Elos Hailu applied a few times before winning the lottery. The father of three is a native of Eritrea; his wife is Ethiopian. They applied for the lottery while he was on a graduate scholarship in the United Kingdom, following a conflict between their home countries in the late 1990s.
His first job in the U.S. was working security at a rental car company, though he eventually returned to academia, researching the experiences of fellow diversity lottery recipients and finishing his doctorate. He now works at a community college in Colorado.
Because of the education or work experience required by the lottery, and the needs to be able to apply - like access to the internet and the funds to pay for the eventual green card fees, health screening, and travel - he believes diversity immigrants generally come from relatively well-off positions in their home countries, and as such are a net positive for the U.S.
“They sacrifice what they have had in their own countries, just to bring to change for their children,” says Hailu. “On the other hand, the United States gains from people who have been educated, without spending any money on these people. So why would you [cut it]?”
The RAISE Act has been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee for review.
Follow legislative actions on S. 354 here here and H.R.1178 - SAFE for America Act here.
This story was first reported in VOANews.com. Do you have or want a Green Card? Please leave a comment here, and visit us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, thanks!
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FAFSA Delays Prompt California to Extend Deadline for Financial Aid Applications
The California Legislature on Thursday voted to give prospective college students more time to apply for two of the state's largest financial aid programs after a glitch in the federal government's application system threatened to block up to 100,000 people from getting help.
California had already extended the deadline for its financial aid programs from March 2 to April 2. On Thursday, the state Senate gave final approval to a bill that would extend it again until May 2. The bill now heads to Governor Gavin Newsom.
"Clearly, our students need our help," Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from Riverside who authored the bill, told lawmakers during a public hearing earlier this week.
California has multiple programs to help people pay for college. The biggest is the Cal Grant program, which gives money to people who meet certain income requirements. The state also has a Middle Class Scholarship for people with slightly higher incomes.
Students can apply for these state aid programs only if they first complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as FAFSA.
This year, a computer glitch prevented parents from filling out the form if they did not have a Social Security number. That meant many students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents but whose parents are not were blocked from completing the form and thus could not apply for California's aid programs.
California has a large population of adults who are living in the country without legal permission. The California Student Aid Commission, the state agency in charge of California's financial aid programs, estimates as many as 100,000 students could be affected by this glitch.
The U.S. Department of Education says it fixed the problem last week, but those families are now a step behind. Democrats in Congress raised alarms last month, noting that the delay could particularly hurt students in states where financial aid is awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, including Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Oregon and Texas.
Advocates fear that the chaos of this year's process could deter students from going to college at all, especially those for whom finances are a key part of the decision.
The computer glitch is just one part of larger problems affecting FAFSA.
The notoriously time-consuming form was overhauled in 2020 through a bipartisan bill in Congress. It promised to simplify the form, going from 100 questions to fewer than 40, and it also changed the underlying formula for student aid, promising to expand it to more low-income students.
But the update has been marred by delays, leaving families across the country in limbo as they figure out how much college will cost.
The form is typically available to fill out in October, but the Education Department didn't have it ready until late December. Even then, the agency wasn't ready to begin processing the forms and sending them to states and colleges, which only started to happen this month.
The problems appear to have already reduced California's application numbers. Through March 8, the number of California students who had completed FAFSA was 43% lower than it was at the same time last year.
"The data most concerning me seems to suggest that these drops are more acute at the schools that serve low-income students or large populations of students of color," Jake Brymner, deputy chief of policy and public affairs for the California Student Aid Commission, told lawmakers in a public hearing earlier this week.
The issue has caused problems for colleges and universities, too. The University of California and California State University systems both delayed their admissions deadlines because so many prospective students were having trouble with FAFSA.