Last week the State Department announced the lucky winners in this year’s Visa Lottery, who will be arriving in communities near you by September, 2010. Fourteen percent of the winners (13,988 people) hail from countries of special interest in the war on terror. Here are the top twelve winning countries:
| 1. | Ghana | 8,752 |
| 2. | Nigeria | 6,006 |
| 3. | Bangladesh | 6,001 |
| 4. | Ukraine | 5,499 |
| 5. | Ethiopia | 5,200 |
| 6. | Kenya | 4,619 |
| 7. | Egypt | 4,201 |
| 8. | Uzbekistan | 4,059 |
| 9. | Sierra Leone | 3,898 |
| 10. | Cameroon | 3,719 |
| 11. | Morocco | 3,124 |
| 12. | Turkey | 2,826 |
Approximately one-half of these winners will pursue their application to completion and eventually receive green cards. View the complete list.
The visa lottery serves no purpose other than to increase immigration for immigration’s sake. It offers green cards to people who offer no particular skills and who lack close family ties here. Fraud is rampant. It creates demand in countries where there was no demand before. It has been exploited by organized crime groups – several years ago, a crime syndicate in Eastern Europe hacked into a university ID card system and manufactured electronic entry forms, complete with photos, unbeknown to the individual students. Then it hijacked the winner notification letters at the post office, contacted the winners, and provided them with spouses to accompany them to the United States, where the lucky winners were coerced into working for the syndicate here. It’s not hard to see why this program has had a target on its back for some time, and few will mourn its passing if Congress ever gets around to ending it.