Visa lottery system may go as US favours skilled workers

If passed by the Congress and signed into law, such a move is expected to significantly reduce the green card backlogs for highly skilled immigrants from India.

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, which the Trump administration wants to terminate, awards up to 50,000 individuals per year a visa for a green card, which allows permanent residency and is a path ton US citizenship.

Trump has been against diversity visa as he believes that this does not attract the best and the brightest to the US.

In the recent past, several of the home grown terrorists including prime accused of New York terrorist attacks came either on diversity visa or chain migration. “Eliminate lottery and reallocate the visas to reduce the family-based ‘backlog’ and high-skilled employment ‘backlog’,” according to the White House framework on immigration reform and border security released by the Trump administration.

The programme provides green cards for up to 50,000 immigrants each year from countries with low rates of emigration to the US. It is one of the ways that green cards are issued under the Immigration and Nationalit Act.