The visa lottery allows the US to maintain myths of the US as a land of welcome and opportunity. It is also arguably one of the few pillars of legitimacy standing in defense of the US immigration system. Immigration restrictionists often admonish that undocumented immigrants should have come the “right way.” For many aspiring immigrants, the visa lottery is the only thing ensuring that there is a “right way” at all, making it all the more striking that those same restrictionists are often the ones leading the charge to eliminate the diversity visa program and the already minuscule chance of success it provides.
Although the visa lottery generates huge benefits for both aspiring immigrants and US foreign policy, these benefits are almost entirely accidental. The program’s bizarre origins stem from the backlash to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eliminated nationality quotas and led to a significant increase in non-European immigration to the US. When Ireland’s economy faltered in the 1980s, tens of thousands of people came to the United States. But most Irish immigration to the US was long enough ago that these new Irish immigrants lacked the close family ties needed to qualify for a visa, and a significant population of undocumented Irish appeared.
Politicians of Irish ancestry sought to find a solution. As Goodman notes, these efforts drew on appeals to the US as a land of openness, a sentiment that the 1965 Act had shown little respect for Irish Americans’ contributions to the country, and a consistent undertone that it was wrong for white immigrants to be undocumented. Advocates of Irish immigration knew that they would not be able to pass a bill permanently favoring Irish immigrants, but they did help shepherd through a 1990 compromise in which Irish immigrants got specific preferences for a transitional period. Thereafter, the visa lottery would apply a formula that prioritized countries that had sent few immigrants to the United States in recent years—which its proponents knew would include Ireland due to several decades of declining European immigration. The politicians opportunistically adopted the label of “diversity visas” for this scheme that they designed to protect white immigration.
But ultimately, and largely accidentally, the visas did end up diversifying US immigration. Relatively few Irish have ended up coming to the US on diversity visas, while nearly half of all visa lottery winners have come from Africa. Because there is limited migration from Africa to the United States through family and employment-based visas, the visa lottery formula produces a significant allocation of diversity visas for African countries.