By Dan Merica and Tal Kopan
President Donald Trump, during a White House Cabinet meeting Wednesday, said he plans to terminate the Diversity Visa Lottery, a program that distributes around 50,000 visas to countries where there is a low rate of immigration to the US.
“I am, today, starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program,” Trump said, seated next to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “I am going to ask Congress to immediately initiate work to get rid of this program, diversity lottery, diversity lottery. Sounds nice, it is not nice, it is not good. It hasn’t been good and we have been against it.”
He added: “We’re going to quickly as possible get rid of chain migration and move to a merit-based system.”
Trump added that based on preliminary information, the attacker in New York “was the point of contact, the primary point of contact for, and this is preliminarily, 23 people, that came in or potentially came in with him and that is not acceptable.”
The comments follow Trump’s tweets on Wednesday morning that blamed Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, for the program.
“The terrorist came into our country through what is called the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program,’ a Chuck Schumer beauty,” Trump tweeted. “I want merit based.”
Schumer was a key shaper of the 1990 legislation that created the program, but also played a lead part in the 2013 Gang of Eight bill that that passed the Senate on a bipartisan basis and included removing the diversity lottery program. The bill would have moved those visas elsewhere in the system and introduced a merit system that took into account multiple factors like family and work skills.
Republican Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue have introduced a bill, endorsed by Trump, that would eliminate the diversity lottery and certain categories of family-based green cards, and then would transform the remaining employment-based visas into a point system that favors heavily highly skilled, highly educated, English-speaking immigrants.
But while there is consensus around needing to reform the process, limited support exists even within the GOP for Cotton and Perdue’s bill.
Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who has been an ardent critic of Trump, noted in a tweet Wednesday that the Gang of Eight bill, had it been signed into law, would have done away with the diversity visa program.
The Cotton-Perdue bill would roughly halve the number of green cards overall per year, a point of contention for many Democrats and Republicans alike, and wouldn’t easily allow for low skilled immigrants to come to the US permanently, another sticking point for many.
Controversial program
The diversity visa has been a point of contention for years. The 50,000 visas, distributed by random selection among countries where there is a low rate of immigration to the US, were originally designed to diversify the pool of immigrants to the US. The visas offer immigrants green cards, permanent legal residence and a path to citizenship.
Right-wing sites blame Schumer
Tuesday’s terror attack in New York was the city’s deadliest since 9/11. Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov drove a rented van down a bike path, law enforcement sources have said. The attack killed six victims instantly, while two others died later. New York politicians and officials quickly labeled the incident a terror attack.
Right-wing blogs and publications began blaming Schumer’s immigration policies on Tuesday night and Trump’s comments track with much of what was written.
“Blame Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer,” read a post from the Gateway Pundit.
Breitbart, the right-wing publication run by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, was leading with a story about the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, citing an ABC New York story that reported Saipov came to the United States through the program.
Turning to immigration politics shortly after a terrorist attack has become a pattern for Trump.
After a deadly mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, then candidate-Trump called for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Trump ran on hard-line immigration policies in 2016, pledging to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, cut down the number of refugees coming into the United States and deporting undocumented immigrants currently in the United States.
After stepping into the Oval Office in January, Trump proposed a sweeping travel ban that banned immigration from a series of countries. The ban, which has been repeatedly altered and fought in court, currently puts increased screening on nationals from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Venezuela and Yemen. Immigration from North Korea and Syria is suspended entirely.
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