Why Does America Have a “Diversity Visa?”

And How to Stop the Lottery Before it Comes Up “Terrorist” Again

Map: The Diversity Lottery means you can receive immigrants from almost any of these countries on the watch list for human trafficking for the sole reason that “diversity is our greatest strength.” Lucky you!

The Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the National Origins quotas of the 1924 Act, which had favored European immigrants. As a result, America has had a flood of non-European immigrants…and Europeans were in effect discriminated against for Visas.

In 1990, the late Teddy Kennedy instituted the “Diversity Visa Lottery” with the specific intention of allowing more Irish immigrants to the US.

Since then, it’s been a source of many overly diverse immigrants, some of whom were terrorists or mass murderers. Recently the Trump Administration paused it after a diverse guy from Portugal, Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, killed two students and wounded nine other students at Brown University.

This is not the first time something like this has happened:

The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.

In 2017, President Trump…

— Special Envoy Kristi Noem (@EnvoyNoem) December 19, 2025

As Kristi Noem writes above

In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people.

That was Uzbek Bike Path Attacker Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, below:

An NBC report from October 31, 2017 said

Suspect in Tribeca Truck Attack Identified as Uzbek National: Sources

By Jonathan Dienst and R. Darren Price, NBC New York

The 29-year-old man detained after a flatbed truck drove down a popular lower Manhattan bike path, killing at least 8 people and injuring more than a dozen more, has been identified as an Uzbek national living in New Jersey.

In a report like this, the words “Uzbek National” are, in effect, a euphemism for immigrant.

After it transpired that Saipov was an Uzbek immigrant here on the Diversity Visa, the New York Times found an Uzbek Rhodes Scholar (now at Stanford) to do an Op-Ed saying, as Steve Sailer blogged at the time: Why the Zeroth Amendment Obligates USA to Have the Diversity Visa Lottery: “No Person Has a Greater Claim to the American Dream Than Any Other”

The Op-Ed was titled We Need the Diversity Visa Lottery By Machmud Makhmudov November 2, 2017, and I suppose by “we” Mr. Makhmudov means the citizens of the United States.

By the way, the fact that Makhmudov, now an American citizen, got a Rhodes Scholarship, which Cecil Rhodes intended “to promote unity among English-speaking nations” is just one more example of high-skilled immigration displacing a better class of American.

At the time of the Uzbek mass killing, Steve Sailer pointed out that he’d called out the Diversity Visa as long ago as 2002 in an article for UPI:Analysis: The curious immigration lottery, UPI, July 29, 2002.

Oddly enough, the diversity lottery originated as a way to bring more whites to the United States. White ethnic politicians in America felt that their distant relatives in Europe had been squeezed out by chain migration from the Third World. So, natives of the 14 largest sources of legal immigrants — such as Mexico, India and China — are banned from participating. In particular, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., saw a diversity lottery as a way to boost the number of legal Irish immigrants.

[Center for Immigrants Studies head Mark] Krikorian explained, “It was cooked up in the 1986 law to provide a way to amnesty Irish illegal aliens, since the main amnesty in that law primarily benefited Mexicans. In fact, to this day the lottery is often referred to by congressmen and their staff as ‘The Irish Program.’ But as the program evolved, and as there were fewer and fewer Irish illegals, its emphasis changed, and it’s now more accurately described as the Middle Eastern, East European and African program.”

Only 331 visas were awarded to Irish applicants this year.

But the reason Sailer was writing about this crazy visa in 2002 is because of another immigrant atrocity—when Hesham Mohamed Hedayet , below, shot up the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport.

The late Sam Francis wrote at the time:

If it’s proof of the sheer, homicidal insanity of American immigration policy you want, consider the case of the late Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who achieved immortality of a kind when he shot and killed two people at Los Angeles International Airport last week on July 4. Mr. Hedayet may or may not have been a “terrorist,” actually connected to some formal terrorist organization. But he certainly was an immigrant.

Mr. Hedayet, himself shot down by an El Al security guard after he began blasting by-standers at the El Al ticketing area on Independence Day, was in this country legally, through the grace of a program known as 245(i), which is supposed to let in aliens who meet certain work qualifications and which both President Bush and a bipartisan coalition of the Open Borders lobby have been trying to expand. But the only way that Mr. Hedayet was even able to apply for legal status under 245(i) is that his wife won a lottery.

The lottery in question awards a green card, the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s ticket of legal immigration status, on the basis of “diversity” to some 55,000 foreigners every year. Once she got her green card and became legal, then her husband could apply for legal residency himself under 245(i) and stay here if he paid a fine of $1,000.

Welcome to America in the 21st century. [More]

It’s now America in the second quarter of the 21st Century, and it’s finally time, with the Trump Administration firmly in control, to just stop doing this. While Trump can simply refuse to issue refugee visas, as head of the Executive Branch, the Diversity Visa Lottery is a congressionally mandated program, and needs to be repealed by Congress. One avenue for this would be the Assimilation Act, of which we wrote last week, whose

structure and provisions align closely with core America First priorities: it ends exponential family-chain migration, eliminates the anti-assimilation diversity lottery, imposes a national-interest gate that includes cultural considerations, and raises concrete assimilation and self-sufficiency bars. The Assimilation Act represents the strongest congressional attempt in generations to halt mass immigration and to replace it with an immigration system focused upon quality and cultural compatibility.

There are other options for repeal. The America First Policy Institute wrote in February that

After 30 years, the Diversity Visa Program does not advance America’s national interest, nor was it ever designed to do so. Indeed, sold under the guise of “diversity,” the program was unabashedly designed to import less-educated, low-skilled workers of Irish descent to appease the constituencies of Northeast politicians. The program has been riddled with fraud from its inception, making security checks and eligibility determinations unreliable. Additionally, lax rules that fail to address the dangers posed by state sponsors of terrorism and other terrorist groups present significant national security concerns.

The Trump Administration has rightfully paused the Diversity Visa Program in the wake of the shooting at Brown University. America’s immigration programs should not be designed based on the ease with which foreign nationals can use (or abuse) them. Instead, such programs should place the interests of Americans first. It is time that Congress ends the DV Program and replaces it with a program that promotes merit-based immigration, where individuals are selected to come to the United States based on education, skill, self-sufficiency, and ability to contribute to our economy and society.

See It’s Time for Congress to End the Diversity Visa Program by Julie Kirchner and Kassidy Scott February 5, 2026.

Thirty plus years of “diversity” is enough.

James Fulford has been writing about the national question for over 20 years, mostly for VDARE.com, more recently for WhitePapers. Subscribe to his personal Substack here.