Andy: We’ve been issuing “diversity visas” for immigration through the Visa Lottery for 20 years now. The top countries for the current lottery are here, including Nigeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, and Iran. Ukraine is the only one of the top countries that’s not either majority-Muslim or home to a large Muslim minority. In my House testimony a few years back, I’d calculated that about one-third of visa lottery winners came from Muslim-majority countries and that the lottery was a disproportionately important immigration vehicle for Muslims. While in 2008, visa lottery winners accounted for less than 4 percent of total legal immigration, they accounted for 46 percent of Algerians, 38 percent of Moroccans and Egyptians, 25 percent of Bangladeshis, 19 percent of Turkey Turks, 12 percent of Azeri Turks. Actually, the lottery isn’t that important a vehicle for immigrants from Sudan and Yemen; of 2008’s green-card recipients from those countries, the lottery accounted for only 7 percent and 1 percent, respectively. Most Yemenis came here through family-chain migration (in 2008 1,631 out of 1,872), and most Sudanese as refugees (2,683 out of 3,598). So while getting rid of the lottery would be a security improvement, the rest of our immigration system is also a problem.

But, as usual, abolishing even a stupid program like the Visa Lottery isn’t easy. Its first iteration came in the 1980s as an affirmative-action program for Irish immigrants, who were supposedly underrepresented in the immigrant flow. Now, it’s a major source of African immigration and the Black Caucus has adopted it and declared that attempts to abolish it would be racist.