Diversity Lottery

Posted on May 16, 2013 by peterstone

It appears that the U.S. Diversity Lottery may be in trouble. Thoughts?

A segment on today’s Take Two featured an interview with a immigration policy expert on the Diversity Visa Lottery, a quirky program based partly on random selection that rewards applicants from countries that are under-represented among the nation’s immigrant diasporas. The Senate immigration reform bill proposes doing away with the program.

If the diversity visa sounds familiar, that’s because a related fiasco made headlines two years ago: In the spring of 2011, thousands of applicants were mistakenly informed they’d won an immigrant visa by the U.S. government, and then — whoops! — told there had been a computer glitch and that the good news was a mistake.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | Tagged: , |

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One Response

  1. André Sauzeau, on May 18, 2013 at 4:49 pm said:

    The diversity program lottery by itself is not an important thing, given its size. Which is interesting is one line of argumentation used against this program, which can be subsumed by the equation :
    use of lot= randomness= irrationality= lack of control = danger.
    Actually, we can doubt that this random way could interest strongly terrorist groups trying to enter USA to carry terrorist attacks : they will not wait the good luck ! We are said that there are instances of such cases, but is there a statiscal proof that the (bad) luck is greater than for other immigration programs ?
    We are not explained why a (anyway difficult) safety screening of immigrants would be more difficult for « lottery immigrants » than for refugees, professionals, students etc .
    The « national security » argumentation against the « arational» method of lottery looks somewhat irrational.

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