The numbers don’t seem to be that high. 50,000 visas per year through the lottery compared to about 1,000,000 new immigrants per year in total (and that’s before we even consider how many people leave the U.S. per year).

Since the proportion is so low and the lottery targets people from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S., I’d guess the main purpose is to create goodwill towards America in countries that don’t already have strong ties with it, and to pay lip service to that little poem engraved inside the Statue of Liberty.

America certainly has problems with the gap between rich and poor (as Britain, where I was born, and Japan currently do), but if businesses in America exploit immigrants from poor countries, the blame surely lies with business, not immigrants. Perhaps there should be stricter employment regulations and a better minimum wage to ensure that immigrants aren’t being used to undercut local workers, I don’t know. However, I find the idea that crime organisations are somehow infiltrating the Department of State and rigging the lottery to bring in dangerous criminals ludicrous. Crime families like the Mafia have all kinds of other ways of sneaking people into the country without doing something so complex as messing around with a federal government scheme like this.

Also, I think once someone starts making comments like “getting more immigrants to degrade their country even further” their rhetoric is moving into a very dangerous area. I’m an expatriate living far away from the place I was born and I would hope I don’t “degrade” the country in which I now live. The Green Card Lottery at least requires that its applicants have a high school diploma or a couple of years of work-based training, which is more than millions of native born Americans/British/Japanese etc. have. Who’s “degrading” what in this case?

My friend wrote me as follows.

“In my opinion, the Green Card Lottery (G.C.L.) is a scam that the rich people in America wants. This is because by allowing foreign poor country folks to go live in America, America is allowing low-wage employment opportunities for these uneducated workers. This means that big companies such as Burger King, or McDonald, or Wallmart could hire these people and pay them a very low wage and they wouldn’t complain. This is extremely bad for the American economy right now and it’s one of the reason why the American economy is collapsing. By having these lower income workers, the average American could not easily find a starting job to earn some tuition thus causing a problem in the quality of American industries. The rich people would have their children go to expensive private schools while the poor people would stay poor and learn from (some) badly taught public schools which, will cause a more visible hierarchy of income. In short, rich people can pay to rig these lotteries because they have the money to pay someone in the government to do it, and also it is dangerous as well. It is dangerous in the sense that some crime organization could use this as a way to import their friends/relatives from another country to America thus increasing crime rate as well. All in all, it is a bad idea as I see it. America really needs to fix what is happening NOW with their country instead of getting more immigrants to degrade their country even further.”

I do not know what the truth is. I would like to research Green Card Lottery.