FlightRisk

Oh well, looks like just like one more legal way to live in the US has been removed. So you either need to be rich, marry a US citizen, or have an employer that is willing to sponsor you. Oh yeah, you can always seek political asymum.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051217/...order_security

-f

Ray

Jumping the gun a bit there .. The Bill as it is... is unlikely to get through the Senate ..

nettlebed

Yep. On the basis of yesterday's showing it looks as though the senate (even our two from Washington) are fially starting to grow some (admittedly somewhat rudimentary) cojones...

Seanus

Interesting. there was a segment on CBS (60 minutes) a few weeks back regarding all the ilegals coming over the border from Mexico. I suspect this article could be indirectly related to that.

but Damn, Ray you are looking sexier with each passing day LOL!

hcj1440

I do think it's good that they want to end the "catch and release" program for non-Mexican illegals. That would be a much better way for a terrorist to come to the US than through the diversity lottery. (ON EDIT: The yahoo article said, "Opponents said [the diversity lottery] was susceptible to fraud and could be a way for terrorists to enter the country." I think that's pretty BS. How can it be any harder to discover fraud and terrorists in DV applicants than in family- or employment-based applicants?)

Here's an NPR article for anyone who's not familiar with the catch and release program. Basically if you come across the Mexico border and you aren't Mexican, they just give you a ticket telling you to go to court in X number of days, and then they let you go free into the US. Of course hardly anyone caught this way will show up in court at the appointed time -- they just disappear into the country somewhere.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=4738292
"If a Mexican citizen crosses the U.S. border and gets caught, the person is deported within hours. But non-Mexican citizens who are detained are allowed to stay with a government-issued slip. NPR's John Burnett reports on the immigration policy that has allowed thousands of undocumented people to go free."

jeffreyhy

FlightRisk,

Or, you can continue to live where you do now. Everyone does not need to live in the USA.

Regards, JEff

Matthew Udall

I think they are more worried about fraud they “don’t” discover.

Not every citizen from every country is eligible to participate in the lottery, and I’ll bet there are some who submit entries who are not eligible but who lie about what country they are from or perhaps lie about qualifying through the exceptions associated with the parents.

With family and employment based cases, the foreigner enters with people waiting for them and interacting with them. For a DV entrant, he or she might not know one person in the U.S.

I’m not saying that is a bad thing (to enter as a DV winner, nor am I in favor of eliminating the program) but I’m saying a DV entrant might have less people in their lives that could report any observed terrorist activity.

fatbrit

Well that one is clutching at straws!

The terrorist excuse is such a lame one and rolled out for anything and everything since 9/11, and they should be called on it each and every time. It's becoming the biggest red herring out there! Well, that and the conspiracy against Christmas.

nettlebed

I agree with you 100% The terrorist excuse is right there with Jessica Lovejoy's "Oh, won't somebody think of the children!" as a lame way of trying to stop people opposing you by potentially demonising them in some way or another.

Unfortunately, it looks as though it is a disease that the British government is catcting from the US. For thirty-odd years I lived in London with terrorist attacks happening with fair regularity, and the city did admirably. Now, the terrorist card is played whenever a politician wants to force through some legislation infringing on people's rights, freedoms and privacy.

Well, the terrorirsts are winning when they can create restrictions on freedoms like this, and it sickens me to hear people saying that the terrorists "hate us because of our freedoms". It's just so much horseshit.

fatbrit

Yep! I sometimes think the terrorists did win. They really couldn't have hoped to cause so much change in a way of life with such a small investment.

I, too, was living in London during some of the IRA bombings of the seventies and eighties. It was a non-event. Can remember a few minor inconveniences like a tube station suddenly shutting for an hour or two or a street being blocked, but nobody I know lived their life in terror of it happening to them. Everybody realised that you were more likely to be run over by a bus than blown up in it.

Sad what fuelling people's fears can do to allow you to control them.

Matthew Udall

I agree with you about the terrorism excuse. We should try to have good systems in place to try to catch this sort of thing, but I think its also blown out of proportion.

But the statement about fraud in the lottery is a valid one. I haven't followed lottery results in quite a while, but last time I did I was surprised to see how many entries were disqualified because the person entering submitted more than 1 entry. Many are also disqualified because the person had someone else sign their entry (I would think this would happen more often when the deadline is only a day or two away, and someone gets help from someone else who could get it delivered on time... and this was back when lottery entries were submitted by regular mail).

And there are quite a number of people selected in the lottery who then go to a U.S. Consulate to process, only to be found to be ineligible after all due to where they were born (a country not eligible, for example), not listing their kids on their entry, not listing their spouse on their entry, falsely claiming eligibility through the narrow parental exception, submitting multiple entries under slight variations of their name, etc.

Whether or not the lottery should be eliminated is another topic (personally I'd not like to see that option eliminated). Diversity is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

Hypertweeky

Cojones lol.. I haven't heard that word in such long time

fatbrit

Any government program that provides a benefit seems to attract the shady characters and fraud from day one, regardless of the benefit. They seem to be pretty good at weeding them out, though, and now it is an electronic entry it shouldn't be too onerous.

One thing that encourages fraud is the fact that government always likes to make the easy complicated. The old application notes for the diversity visa ran to a dozen or so pages of terse instructions, when they could have been simply stated on a page or two given a rewrite in plain language. If you make it complicated, there is much more opportunity for fraudsters (and lawyers!).

The nice thing about the diversity visa is that it is in some ways emulates the spirit of mass immigration that originally made America great. I like to think of it as the best visa money can't buy. The diversity visa is not responsible for America's immigration woes, but in the current climate it makes an easy scapegoat.

scrubbedexpat099

Like assylum, a relic of a bygone age.

fatbrit

This the diversity visa or the lawyers you're talking about?