Let’s Kill the Lottery Before It Gives Away Another 50,000 U.S. Jobs to Foreign Workers

Congress and the Administration still plan to go through with a program that every fall, in effect, takes 50,000 U.S. jobs  and raffles them off to foreign workers on pure chance. Never mind that 14 million unemployed Americans are looking for a job.

If that doesn’t make any sense to you, get passionate about Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s SAFE for America Act (H.R. 2305). Let’s kill this absurd lottery before autumn.

The Visa Lottery raffles off U.S. citizenship — without any regard to a person’s education, skills, character, family relation, humanitarian need or the impact on American workers, taxes and quality of life.

The fact is that every year the federal government raffles off greencards (and path to U.S. citizenship) to 50,000 of the millions who play the lottery.

Nearly all of those 50,000 will immediately seek a job.

Those 50,000 foreign lottery winners will either take a job from an American, or fail to find a job and become a total net consumer of taxpayer benefits and infrastructure.

Could this possibly happen if rational people were making immigration decisions?

Mainly, it happens because immigration programs are on auto-pilot, and nobody actually makes a decision.

But with H.R. 2305 we have a chance to force every Member of Congress to make a decision on whether to, in effect, raffle off 50,000 jobs to foreigners.

We are starting a faxing campaign today to push every Member of the House of Representatives to co-sponsor H.R. 2305 and protect 50,000 American workers this fall.

There is no logical reason why Congress should allow the lottery to occur this coming October.

If we raise enough public ruckus about the lottery this summer, we can make it clear that everybody who fails to co-sponsor Goodlatte’s bill has actually made the decision to continue a callous, irrational program against unemployed Americans.

Is your U.S. Representative on the co-sponsor list? Check it out.

For those of you without the historical perspective, you may wonder why in the world the lottery was ever created. The answer is that it was the method to legalize a lot more illegal Irish aliens.  The Irish ambassador and Sen. Kennedy worked to create the lottery in which a disproportionate share of the winners would be Irish.  The rest of the winners were apportioned among countries that don’t have a lot of immigrants in the country.  The first Pres. Bush signed the lottery into law.

The pro-Irish discimination provisions have sunsetted so that all the slots now go to countries that have very little history of immigration to the U.S. Thus, the lottery has created new immigrant streams in villages and countries across the world where they didn’t previously exist.  All of those lottery winners are then able to start applying for their extended family, creating huge pressures among those waiting in line to come on illegally and wait while in the U.S.  The lottery since 1990 has created huge hardship for Americans and American communities.

We now have around a million lottery winners in the country, plus untold numbers of their relatives because of the program.  How much longer will we allow this to continue?

The lottery has always been absurd.  But it is doubly so this year.

Please demand that your Representative sign H.R. 2305 or publicly state why not.  Congressman Goodlatte has steadfastly led the way on this reform for years and years. We thank him for his efforts.

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA