January 26, 2010

Teddy Kennedy's Irish Sweepstakes

One of the wackier government policies is the Diversity Lottery Program, which began in 1990 as part of a bill intended by Ted Kennedy to, in part, let in more Irish immigrants. Ultimately, it didn't bring in many Irish. Instead, the Irish began to deal with their own problems in order to make Ireland a nicer place to live.

It's worth taking a look at a gateway website, which is reminiscent of Ed McMahon's old Publisher's Clearing House lottery junk mail:

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Live & Work in USA


- Participate in the Official US Green Card Lottery!
50.000 People Will Win a Lifetime Green Card to USA

Your Name belongs Here!


In order to win the American Green Card Lottery to
Live and Work in United States,
you are required to enter the following information.
Please use only the English Alphabet.
First Name:


Last Name (Family Name):


E-mail address:



E-mail address again:
*Please write your e-mail again to ensure you wrote your e-mail correctly


Country Of Birth:





Marital Status:






Do you have job OR Have you finished high school * ?


Telephone
County code

Area Code
Telephone
Mobile Telephone
County code

Area Code
Mobile Telephone

* The telephone helps us to contact you when you win


Click Here to Continue!

This is the official USAGC Organization web site,
which specializes in the registration to the
American Green Card Lottery program
for clients all over the world. Please make sure
you do not register with any site that pretends to
be the USAGC Organization. To make sure you
register with USAGC Organization, check that at
the top of the browser it is written USAGC.

USAGC Organization provides free green card eligibility
test for everyone. In order to participate in the
DV green card lottery program, one should take
this eligibility test and make sure he /she
follows the right constrains to apply for a green card.
Green card eligibility terms are defined
by the US Department of State.
USAGC sends e-mail updates.
*Education OR Work experience

An applicant must have EITHER a high school education
or its equivalent, defined in the U.S. as successful
completion of a 12-year course of elementary and
secondary education; OR two ears of work experience
within the past five years in an occupation requiring
at least two years of training or experience to perform.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s O*Net OnLine database
will be used to determine the occupations that require
at least two years of training or experience to perform.


If we're going to let in 50,000 people per year (plus, eventually, their relatives and in-laws), couldn't we at least try to start with letting in the best 50,000, with "best" being defined as those most likely to benefit "ourselves and our posterity" (to quote the Preamble to the Constitution.)

Why do we have to have a lottery? Teddy went to Harvard (for awhile). Does Harvard let people in by lottery? Why is a lottery good enough for the United States of America, but not good enough for Harvard?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

57 comments:

Anonymous said...

I Googled it, and this looks like the official website: http://www.dvlottery.state.gov/

Anonymous said...

The fine print at the bottom also says you must have "two ears experience." Incredible.

headache said...

Why is a lottery good enough for the United States of America, but not good enough for Harvard?

coz the people running Harvard know full well what the results of such a lottery would be. Meanwhile they lobby for uncontrolled immigration. They must think they can somehow keep that little paradise in a see of Thrid World culture. This illusion did not work out so well for South African liberals.

Default User said...

I am probably not the first to point out that the site is not a government site. In the small print at the bottom of the page they claim "usagc.org website is a private entity and is not a governmental agency"

I will not call it a scam but it does do what any applicant could do themselves for free, namely (from the website):
"We, at the USAGC Organization, charge for the professional and expertise service we give you. Our professional service includes: application service, information check, correcting of wrong or invalid data, support in different languages, correct completion of the application, and submission of the application on time and to the correct address. USAGC ensures that your application will not be disqualified."

OhioStater said...

The focus of liberalism is to elevate yourself and your class at the expense of others.

In Teddy Kennedy's case that means elevating the Irish, and in Jesse Jackson's case, that means elevating blacks.

This is rainbow politics, and it might be useful for Jesse and Teddy to stand together, but at times their aims are contradictory, such as testing requirements in police and fire departments.

Success has a lot of fathers and the Democratic Party is falling apart since Obama cannot repay his base in an orderly and timely fashion.

Anonymous said...

And what about the huge number of people who come here on visa as "tourists", "students", visitors of relatives, etc, who then just disappear into America? In Illinois an illegal alien under age 18 can get Medicaid. In addition they are protected as the state won't divulge that info to INS. Ditto with the public school system. Nice, break the law and one part of the government will obstruct the other part.

Anonymous said...

How do other countries immigration work? Are they mostly by lottery in the EU, Australia, Canada, NZ and other places very desirable?

Doesn't Canada have an immigration system based upon points for education, youth, assets, bringing in a business that hires locals, etc? Any metrics/studies on how well this work beyond the obvious common sense?

CJ said...

Canadians are not eligible for the diversity lotttery. They never have been.

Just a public service message to keep iSteve readers in tip-top informational shape.

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

Well back to that effort to let more Haitians into the United States by the niftiest, cleverist, wittiest, most patriotic Israelis ever to grace these shores:

Celestin, a 49-year-old restaurant worker and U.S. citizen [and Haitian immigrant], was so frustrated listening to her brother plead for her to help family members reach Miami that she accepted a one-way plane ticket from her church and flew to Haiti with a small delegation of parishioners Saturday night. She has no idea how she will afford to get home. Still, Celestin said, she hopes to find her way to the U.S. Embassy in the shattered capital and beg someone to let her relatives go back with her. "In Haiti, they have nothing at all," she said. "In the U.S., people can help them out."

In other words, bring Haitians here so that we can give them welfare here rather than there.

Works for me.

Dutch Boy said...

The USA is a heavily-populated country that has no need for immigrants. Those who believe otherwise are motivated by ignorance, greed or malice (heavy on the last two).

Anonymous said...

Off topic post: Teen Pregnancy On the Rise.

Liberals will blame Bush's sex ed policies, but how much has to do with the massive growth in the Hispanic population?

Anonymous said...

The lottery is not random. Some visas are dispensed as special favors. For example, my friend who is Poland came here illegally. He received a green card because President Bush wanted support for the Iraq war. The Polish government asked for immigration assistance for its illegals. Guess what? Poland received a large numbers of green cards that year.

Eric said...

Why do we have to have a lottery?

Instead of selecting for intelligence we're selecting for luck. Who needs Albert Einstein when you can have Teela Brown?

Anonymous said...

In re: the above poster, I'd rather have Polacks than almost any other nationality we're letting in the country right now.

[BTW, I had to try four different variations on the spelling of "Polack" before I got a hit a m-w.com.]

Anonymous said...

This one's for Whiskey:

"Avatar" Tops "Titanic" as Highest Grosser of All-Time

SF said...

In other news, Gov Schwarzenegger proposes to imprison criminal aliens in Mexico to save money. We'll see how far this gets. CNN immediately trashed the idea.

Bob said...

The site you linked too appears to be one of many thousands of those that scam people wanting to immigrate to the USA. When I was a in foreign countries viewing US website, a large portion of the banner ads were for green card scams.

Jeremiah Whitmoore said...

Kinda like that great immigration bill Teddy passed in 1965!

Anonymous said...

Lottery? Why not? Better than the game of dunk-the-secretary.

Eric said...

How do other countries immigration work? Are they mostly by lottery in the EU, Australia, Canada, NZ and other places very desirable?

I don't know about the others, but prospective immigrants to Australia are assigned points based on desirable qualities. You get points for higher education. You get points for desirable skills. Points are also assigned inversely by age, on the theory younger people will contribute more to society before they retire.

I can't remember if they take everyone over a certain point value or if they take the top n for some value of n.

All in all it's a pretty reasonable system.

Anonymous said...

Why? Why? Why?

Pres. Barack Obama destructive healthcare policy?

Sen. Ted Kennedy destructive immigration policy?

Gen. Togo West destructive counter-terrorism policy?

Instead of looking for intellectual coherence in the policies of the left in America why not see the project for what it is: a multi-front attack.

Because the whole ball of wax is an exercise in Gramsci/Marx strategy of culture cracking.

THIS IS CULTURE CRACKING.

Anonymous said...

We need to create a diversity lottery for Haiti. I don't mean for Haitian immigrants to the US. I mean for immigrants to Haiti.

What Haiti needs is at least 100K immigrants from China and India and any other place where high IQs and entrepreneurial spirit reside.

Haiti would become more multicultural and the new arrivals would help to right the ship.

rob said...

"two ears experience." Incredible.

Well heyell, I got me two ears, if you count the one I keep on a string 'round my neck. What experience do I need me to have with them ears?

More Haitian immigrants: has anyone said, what the US has a severe shortage of HIV-positive illiterates? If you've never said that, you should oppose Haitian immigration. OTOH, if the Mexicans keep being uppity, the Haitians will drive them off. Then the Haitians will die off AIDS. It's the beauty of nature.

Anonymous said...

Witness Tyler Cowen who keeps pushing to letting a bunch of Haitians into the country. Somehow I doubt him or his family will bear the externality caused by a bunch of relatively uncivilized, low IQ NAM's.

dWj said...

> Teddy went to Harvard (for awhile). Does Harvard let people in by lottery?

I suppose that would explain it.

Of course, it's possible Teddy got in not by lottery, but as the relative or in-law of someone who got in previously.

Anonymous said...

Time to stop immigration.

Chris said...

The 3 countries winning the most visas this year were Ghana, Nigeria and Bangladesh. Together they collected 42% of the visas. Ireland got 0.33%.

http://tinyurl.com/yhjso35

eh said...

It's not called the 'Diversity Visa Lottery' for nothing. That's the goal, nothing else.

Anonymous said...

We need more asian immigrants.

Anonymous said...

(Clff Arroyo)

"my friend who is Poland"

L'etat, c'est lui.

Anonymous said...

"Two ears of work experience"

So what are they looking for rabbits and donkeys? - Is ear length rather than educational credentials the new metric of eligibility?

OhioStater said...

At some point immigrants will leave the US if the economy doesn't improve. If they didn't assimilate, they were here to make money, and if they aren't making money, they will leave.

Anonymous said...

We need more asian immigrants.

No.

Peter A said...

Instead, the Irish began to deal with their own problems in order to make Ireland a nicer place to live.

Yeah, right. Have you ever been to Boston or New York, Steve? You can't spit without hitting an Irish immigrant. And the ones who stayed home didn't make Ireland a nicer place - it's the most screwed up country in the EU. It's funny that people who are so "brave" about telling the truth about HBD are usually in denial about the Irish. Every English person knows what losers the Irish are.

Graham Asher said...

Well, the crazy thing is the exclusion of the UK, apart from Northern Ireland. The lottery asks for country of birth, and my country of birth is 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. You can't split up sovereign nations like that, or rather, it looks like a calculated insult to do so.

VG said...

How did you manage to copy the entire thing, with coding and all?

Anonymous said...

OhioStater said

>Success has a lot of fathers and the Democratic Party is falling apart since Obama cannot repay his base in an orderly and timely fashion.<

Why is the wittiest and most insightful thing said about Obama's decline found on Steve's comments page and not in the MSM?

Anonymous said...

>What Haiti needs is at least 100K immigrants from China and India [thus] Haiti would become more multicultural<

Multiculturalism is a misnomer. Its real meaning is a race to the bottom, not the top. You've got it backward!

Anonymous said...

I'm a legal immigrant. I got my green card via the 2006 lottery. I'd already been living in the USA for 3 years on a student visa.

I now have a very good job. My wife and I have household income in the 97th percentile. We pay large amounts of tax and, presumably, contribute to American society through our work and community involvement as well.

The vetting process for the green card lottery is quite rigorous; at least, it was for us. Perhaps immigrants coming from chaotic messes like Nigeria are not vetted as thoroughly since it is not possible. We had to provide police certificates from every place we'd ever lived, we had to show evidence of earning potential and assets, and we had to show English proficiency; fortunately, they accepted our graduate degrees and TOEFL scores for that.

Even if people like us are relatively uncommon among lottery winners, there are none at all among the 300,000 plus illegals who jump the southern border every year. Fence the Mexican border, everything else is a diversion.

-Bushrod

corvinus said...

The 3 countries winning the most visas this year were Ghana, Nigeria and Bangladesh. Together they collected 42% of the visas. Ireland got 0.33%.

That's the thing... the visas are given based upon each continent's population that does NOT live in an ineligible country, with fewer being given to continents that send more than their share of immigrants to the USA (in other words, Latin America and Asia).

Within each continent, awards are based upon the demand from each country. So, in the case of Africa, which has the largest eligible population (no African country is ineligible yet), there are lots of Ghanaians and Nigerians trying to get in on the lottery. Similarly, in Asia, Bangladeshis.

Eventually, chain-migration from those highly fertile countries (Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bangladesh) will increase so they become ineligible. (The inverse doesn't happen much; AFAIK, Taiwan is the only one to become eligible again via slumping chain migration.) But then, the next most populous countries in Africa will increase their migration chains.

The threat of vastly increased chain migration from Africa is THE reason this lottery needs to be ended ASAP.

rob said...

"Two ears of work experience"

So what are they looking for rabbits and donkeys? -


Even asking that question makes you a racist. What do you have against rabbits? You think donkeys are better, racist?

Anonymous said...

The #1 priority needs to be to end this Diversity lottery garbage, the H-1B, the L1 and repeal the 1965 Immigration Act. Anything other than that and this nation is simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Chris said...

"Why is a lottery good enough for the United States of America, but not good enough for Harvard?"

Because the people who go to Harvard don't want more competition.

Otis the Sweaty said...

What's with the Irish bashing? My town is almost entirely Irish and they are just like white Americans everywhere else. The only difference is that they often have a very distinct look.

Anonymous said...

How did you manage to copy the entire thing, with coding and all?

I'm not much good with the back end of this interweb thingy, but I believe he selected "View/Source" from the menu bar (if you're using IE). Then you can view and copy the HTML code.

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

At some point immigrants will leave the US if the economy doesn't improve. If they didn't assimilate, they were here to make money, and if they aren't making money, they will leave.

Ever heard of welfare?

You're wrong - they would leave - if welfare didn't exist, and if their own countries weren't perfect shitholes. In the early 1900s lots of immigrants returned home, for one reason or another. Supposedly about half of all Italians went back (see Tom Sowell's Migrations & Cultures). But do you really think these people are going back to Guatemala or Somalia, no matter how much welfare gets cut? (As if it would get cut.)

Anonymous said...

Immigration must be shut off for 20 years at least. We don't even need educated immigrants to compete against Americans. Who cares if you are paying taxes and an immigrant. Americans can do that job and pay those taxes. There are suburbs of Chicago that are almost 40% foreign born, which is a joke. I am really getting sick of immigrants.

Okinawan Irishman said...

Steve, I've been over this before. YOur evidence for this was a link which contained a weak statement, unsupported by actual Irish reaction to the bill. This is not about being pro-EMK, but rather pro-truth. I would hazard a guess that, on the whole, the Irish American community is more pro-immigration than your beknighted Scotch-Irish Brigade. This doesn't change the fact you have no evidence this was his goal, and judging by Irish hostility to it, along with the fact that the Irish didn't benefit from it, should lead you to conclude this was not if fact his goal.

A far more interesting post would be why so many Irish continued to go to England.

Also, the Irish didn't and haven't gotten their house in order.

corvinus said...

Peter A and Svigor- yep you have a reason to be pissed at the Irish what with their high rates of military service, helping build the country since the 1800's and being a humorous group altogether. What a bunch of losers, huh?

You two miserable idiots deserve one another.


Agreed. I'm of Irish descent, and it always amuses me how hateful Protestant Brits (and not being sickeningly PC, this is one of the few times I have actually used the word "hateful") pretty much raped our homeland and stole its wealth and power, then proclaim us "losers" as if we were like the Haitians.

And we were the same folks who were pretty much the only island of civilization in Western Europe during the Dark Ages. And this isn't mythological, as with the Afrocentrists' claims -- this is a documented fact.

Anonymous said...

A far more interesting post would be why so many Irish continued to go to England.

Mentioned this before...my subjective impression is that Irish settlers in England/Britain assimilate long term in a way that Irish Americans dont. At least to the extent that past a two or three generations they stop identifying as Irish. But I often hear people saying they are fourth (or more) generation Irish-American.

Yet - if one buys the whole Irish victimhood meme - this assimilation is happening in the belly of the English imperialist beast but not in the freer US environment.

Anonymous said...

Peter A and Svigor- yep you have a reason to be pissed at the Irish what with their high rates of military service, helping build the country since the 1800's and being a humorous group altogether. What a bunch of losers, huh?

Sure you are not confusing Irish and Scots-Irish there anon?

Anonymous said...

Sure you are not confusing Irish and Scots-Irish there anon?


no- that applies to the irish and the Scotch-Irish and i do understand the difference

Truth said...

"it always amuses me how hateful Protestant Brits...pretty much raped our homeland and stole its wealth and power, then proclaim us "losers" as if we were like the Haitians.

I have to agree with you there, Sport; I mean, the Haitians are...well, what they are; while the Irish have a reputation of being unintelligent, drunken, violent, louts, who could not profit in their homeland until they got handouts from their neighbors, adhere strictly to ultra liberal politics, continually whine about the "rape" of their homeland, amongst other past injustices, could not sustain a functioning agricultural system, immigrate to the U.S. illegally and never return, are historically revered for their singing, dancing, athletic and fighting abilities, and spend their entire lives aspiring to defile Nordics and Anglos.

Nope, I don't see a comparison at all.

Curvaceous Carbon-based Life Form said...

Anon said: Sure you are not confusing Irish and Scots-Irish there anon?

Then Anon replied:
no- that applies to the irish and the Scotch-Irish and i do understand the difference


Gentlemen! I do believe we've got a noob Anonymous among us!


Welcome, Noob Anonymous!!

(The tipoff? Didn't realize "Scots-Irish" was being used euphemistically)

corvinus said...

I have to agree with you there, Sport; I mean, the Haitians are...well, what they are; while the Irish have a reputation of being unintelligent, drunken, violent, louts, who could not profit in their homeland until they got handouts from their neighbors, adhere strictly to ultra liberal politics, continually whine about the "rape" of their homeland, amongst other past injustices, could not sustain a functioning agricultural system, immigrate to the U.S. illegally and never return, are historically revered for their singing, dancing, athletic and fighting abilities, and spend their entire lives aspiring to defile Nordics and Anglos.

Nope, I don't see a comparison at all.


Okay, you made some valid points. Some. (I got a chuckle out of them, actually.)

That seems to be because Irish and British have more African levels of testosterone or T receptors, not lower IQ. Young British chavs and yobbos have similar horrible reputations all throughout Europe.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/10/immigrant-relativespouse-sex-ratio-map.html

And I don't know about Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly being ultra-liberal. Neocon, maybe...

Lastly, most Irish live in the United States. The 5% who stayed home in Ireland may just possibly have been selected for those with less ambition and intelligence. The slackers stayed home, in other words.

Anonymous said...

Corvinus - The implication of your 5% of Irish are in Ireland is that 95% left, leaving this tiny minority. But most of that 95% are the desencdants of earlier immigrants, not the same thing at all. Even at the times of highest Irish emmigartion, most people stayed at home.

liamascorcaigh said...

"Instead, the Irish began to deal with their own problems in order to make Ireland a nicer place to live."

No one in Ireland would would dream of living anywhere else except for the weather,rain, rain and more rain - and that's just the summer!