Wednesday, July 20, 2011

HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE PASSES BILL TO KILL VISA LOTTERY


HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE PASSES BILL TO KILL VISA LOTTERY

Next Stop: House Floor

The House Judiciary Committee voted 19-11 to pass H.R. 704, the SAFE for America Act to end the Visa Lottery.

While it is true that it is a form of insanity for a nation to raffle off 55,000 permanent work permits and paths to citizenship each year, we would gain very little if the lottery were killed and the overall legal immigration level stays the same.

The main point of killing the lottery is to reduce overall annual importation of permanent foreign workers by 55,000 a year.

This is the first time since 2004 that a congressional committee has voted to kill the Visa Lottery. The Goodlatte amendment passed on the House floor in 2005, but the Senate never took it up.

If we could get this signed into law, it would be the first time in 97 years that Congress would actually have reduced immigration numbers. Annual immigration has risen from less than 200,000 a year in the 1930s to a an average of more than a million a year since 1990.

Killing the Visa Lottery is a great place to start.

And so it goes...

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