Social Justification of Green Card Lottery

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The Green Card Lottery, which is scheduled to begin accepting applications for 2014 on October 1, is an interesting program in terms of policy for the United States. Generally the United States government grants green cards to people with certain merits. The idea behind this is that they are trying to draw certain people into the United States who can add quantitative value to the United States.

Green cards are given to direct family members of people already in the United States to support the American notion of family values. Americans like the idea of keeping families together, to maintain the traditional nuclear family and mourn its slow demise. Americans will always support re-uniting family, though it might not be necessarily economically beneficial. Green cards are also awarded to those who get jobs in the United States. Recently there have been political moves that further support this trend, some have said that what we need is to import brains and skills, not wives or parents, these people should come on the work visa with the primary applicant. Opponents of immigration claim that by bringing in skilled or educated workers the government is allowing immigrants to take over jobs that Americans could be filling, to which supporters respond that in capitalism greater competition breeds a better market. The third major green card category is for refugees and this visa is granted solely upon humanitarian and compassionate grounds to those who suffer great persecution in their country of origin.

The green card lottery, also known as the diversity visa, is completely different from the above green card categories. The people who are given these green cards are chosen at random. What possible reason could the government have for justifying these visas? The answer to this is within the official name of the program, the diversity visa. There are many large countries that send immigrants to the United States in great numbers, so many that the other visa categories become filled up and future immigrants end up waiting sometimes for as long as a decade for their visa to be cleared.

The massive numbers of immigrants from these countries also create an effect that the government does not want to engender. For a period of time in the United States there was an institutionalized quota system for immigration that favored Europeans over Asians and was eventually decried as being racist for which it really was. The reason it was instituted was because people of the time thought Chinese people to be criminal or bad for society. The absurd things people have thought throughout time! Well, as the immigration system is right now it could easily fall into a market-driven quota which favors larger, more technologically advanced countries. The diversity visa program exists to allow people from all over the world the same chance to enter the United States and make a difference.

So, be sure to apply for the green card lottery in October. You’ve got absolutely nothing to lose, and a prosperous country to gain.