At Last! DV Suspended

Claudio Neves Valente, the Portuguese national alleged to have carried out the recent mass shooting at Brown University and to have shot and killed MIT Prof. Nuno Loureiro, also from Portugal, arrived in the U.S. on the controversial diversity visa. The 1990-created DV randomly awards 50,000 green cards and work permission to foreign nationals whose native countries have historically low immigration rates into the U.S. Shortly after the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that Valente was a DV recipient, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the Trump administration would suspend the visa.

I’ve written about the DV’s shortcomings for years. The concept of selecting U.S. permanent residents through a lottery—regardless of education, skills, or talents—and then allowing them to petition for chain migration relatives is absurd on its face. Yet for more than three and a half decades, the policy has continued despite violent crimes perpetrated by DV winners.

Through chance, I had an opportunity to spend time with a DV winner. A few years ago, I took an extended road trip through the Great American Southwest. During my travels, I spent about a week in the Las Vegas area and came upon a quaint ice cream shop just on the outskirts of town. Since the small store offered early morning cortados, a light lunch menu, and a variety of ice cream and gelato, I gravitated toward it to avoid the raucous casino buffet scene.

As a former owner of an Eastern Long Island ice cream store, I developed a casual friendship with the shop’s proprietress, an Italian national I’ll call Paola.

One day, I asked Paola if she had a sponsor who petitioned for her. No, Paola said—she was a DV lottery winner. After years of failed attempts, she finally won, packed up, and headed to the United States. I congratulated Paola and said that soon she would be able to sponsor her immediate family. But Paola told me that she was divorced, childless, and, unlike most DVs, had no desire to sponsor her extended family.

Paola is the only DV winner I’ve ever met. I can only estimate where she would rank among the 50,000 annual winners on an overall assimilation probability scale, but I’d place her high. Paola owns her own business and is therefore not dependent on social services. She speaks English and has no plans to sponsor other foreign nationals. These are all significant positives.

But if it’s true that Paola is more productive than most DV winners, she’s still not bringing much to the table. Within a ten-mile radius of her ice cream shop, there were at least a half dozen other similar businesses. And Paola employs only two part-time weekend teenage workers who earn minimum wage. Paola isn’t an essential contributor, and judging by the modest foot traffic I observed, her high-overhead business—astronomical rent in a popular strip mall and monstrous utility bills to keep those freezers cranking in 100-degree Nevada summer weather—is merely scraping by.

Every year when the 50,000 DV lottery winners strike it rich, symbolically speaking, immigration restrictionists collectively bang their heads against the wall. Congress should eliminate the pointless DV even if it can’t get its act together on any other commonsense immigration reduction measures. The DV is the opposite of sensible policy.

The majority of DV visas go to individuals who have few modern-day skills and no U.S. family ties. The question is often asked: why does the State Department award globally coveted green cards randomly when Ivy League colleges and Wall Street corporations have a rigid process for admission?

Moreover, the DV is unfair to immigrants who comply with U.S. laws. The visa lottery program does not prohibit illegal aliens from applying. Most family-sponsored immigrants currently face years-long waits to obtain a visa, yet every year the lottery program pushes 50,000 random migrants to the head of the line.

Since 2005, several efforts to eliminate the DV have been introduced in Congress, and all have failed to advance. As a tragic consequence, in 2017, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, a 2010 Uzbekistan DV winner, killed eight and injured eleven when he drove his truck down a bike path in lower Manhattan. President Trump demanded more thorough DV vetting, but the Saipov case quickly faded from the headlines.

lIn 1990, when Congress created the DV, the U.S. population was 249 million, and the foreign-born component was 7.9 percent. As of January 2025, today’s population is 342 million, of which a record 53.3 million are foreign-born legal and illegal immigrants.

Based on the DV’s results since 1990, which have generated more immigration and a higher foreign-born population, Congress should have long ago declared the program a success and ended it. Factoring in the criminal element the visa facilitates, the Trump administration is correct to end the unproductive and dangerous DV.

---

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated columnist who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com