The American Dream Roulette – By Sintia Radu (usnews.com) / Nov 10 2017
This is the third year that Indre Anskaityte will apply for the Diversity Visa Lottery, a program that helps foreign nationals receive U.S. residency.
She is 28 years old and lives in Lithuania, a country where emigration keeps growing despite positive signs from that country’s economy. She decided in 2015 to try her luck for the U.S. program, also called the green card lottery, saying she thought her education background in peace and conflict management would be a better fit in America. With immigration here being a challenging process for workers, winning the lottery would help Anskaityte bypass more complicated steps, such as finding a job and an employer willing to cover the thousands of dollars required to sponsor her status.
“If you don’t get the green card it’s much more complicated to come to the States,” she says.
Anskaityte knows several people who have won the lottery and settled in America through a program that only requires a high school diploma or two years of work experience. She also knows that if selected she’ll need to pass an interview at the U.S. Embassy in her country, have her file reviewed, pass a vetting system, and eventually rebuild her life overseas.
“But if I win, I go,” she says.
Anskaityte is one of the tens of thousands of people in Lithuania who submitted entries to the lottery program. Around 20,000 Lithuanians applied to the lottery in 2015, out of more than 14 million applicants from around 180 countries. But as debate on Capitol Hill continues over the future of the program, immigration experts say U.S. lawmakers need to develop a cohesive, long-term policy that encourages workers with varying education and skills paths to come to America.
“What is the right amount and the right type of immigration for the Unites States?” asks Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University.
The program grants 50,000 green cards annually and started in 1990 as a way of increasing representation of citizens of countries that do not send many people to America.
“It is important to have diversity generally in our immigration system and the diversity lottery itself is one way to increase diversity,” Yale-Loehr says.
The requirements for the lottery are basic and start with applicants being citizens of an eligible country. The program doesn’t require a college education, so some people may also believe it targets low-skilled workers. Overall, the program has become synonymous with an easier path toward obtaining permanent residency in America.
Yet recent events have tainted its reputation and tied it to acts of terrorism, as authorities announced that the man who on Halloween allegedly drove a rented pickup truck through a Manhattan bicycle path and killed eight was an Uzbek immigrant granted residency through the lottery.
The incident prompted President Donald Trump to ask that the program end as part of a debated strategy of encouraging merit-based immigration and attracting only highly skilled individuals.
While the U.S. has historically been touted as a place where intellectuals could find freedom to explore new grounds, the Diversity Lottery is a program that indeed helps workers without college education, for whom experts say immigration is even more difficult.
“It is definitely harder because it can be difficult for an employer to satisfy the federal labor department’s requirement that there are no U.S. workers who could do the job,” Yale-Loehr says.
Aside from having family ties with residents or citizens, people without a college education generally have three options for settling in the U.S. Most, however, rely on finding a company willing to serve as sponsor. Another visa category requires applicants to invest at least $500,000 and create a minimum of 10 U.S. jobs. Around 100,000 such applications were waiting for a decision in November 2016.
But new problems arise as experts say the U.S. economy may suffer if lottery officials do not adequately value applicants’ skills and instead categorize them based on academic education.
“We have to carefully contextualize, as in some countries it takes a lot of ambitions and a lot of investment to get even a high school diploma,” says Deborah Weissman, professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Also, there are a lot of people who migrate and who get into the workforce and whose skills are not acknowledged as being particularly proficient but they are.”
Additionally, a person’s current level of skills says little about the capacity to acquire and use new ones that contribute in the workplace, Weissman says.
“For instance, people who do construction work learn on the job and they learn differently than U.S. workers learn, and there aren’t mechanisms by which those skills could be measured.”
At the same time, it is difficult to assess the impact of the visa lottery on low-skill immigration as data on the topic is scarce.
“Nobody knows if it’s helping low-skill immigration. We don’t have good statistical outcomes about any kind of immigration. We just don’t track immigrants after they arrive in the U.S. to find out how they are doing five or ten years later,” Yale-Loehr says.
If the lottery were to be eliminated, experts says it is hard to predict what would happen to the 50,000 visas allocated to the program. Dropping the program would also ask more fundamental questions about the U.S. immigration system.
“Is it a zero-sum game such that those 50,000 visas go to some other categories?” Yale-Loehr asks. “Should we have more immigration altogether? Should we have less?”
A recent Reuters poll found that the visa lottery is not popular among Americans, with only 25 percent showing support for such program. At the same time, more than 60 percent say immigrants should be allowed to get a work-based permanent resident status.
With this being a challenging topic in America overall, experts say it is important to consider not just the economic aspects of foreign workers joining the country, but also the historic causes and global responsibilities that the U.S. has.
“The U.S. has gone in places, historically and currently, and really disrupted and destabilized economies and environments and people had no choice but to leave,” Weissman says. “We created the conditions that push people out of their countries, but on the other hand we pull them in when we need workers.”
Overall, experts agree that harsh rhetoric about the Diversity Visa Lottery program affects the country’s appeal to foreign workers.
“We will lose skilled individuals if we practice xenophobic policies and politics because people are going to be much less likely to want to come here,” Weissman says.
