President Trump ordered Homeland Security to shut down the diversity visa lottery after learning that the gunman who attacked two U.S. universities this month entered the country under that program.
Authorities said Thursday night that Claudio Manuel Neves Valente was responsible for shootings at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Authorities said he killed himself.
He was from Portugal was a student at Brown earlier this century.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said he came to the U.S. through the lottery. She said Mr. Trump has ordered her to shut the program down.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said.
The visa lottery doles out immigration passes based on chance rather than job skills or family ties. It has long been a target for Mr. Trump, who has pushed for a more purposeful immigration system.
He included ending the lottery as part of his 2018 proposal to grant amnesty to illegal immigrant “Dreamers,” in exchange for border wall money and new limits on the chain of family migration.
The lottery doles out 50,000 passes a year to immigrants. It gives them a green card, signifying permanent legal status, which is the key step on the path to citizenship.
The goal was to broaden the demographics of immigrants to the U.S. beyond traditional sending nations in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.
The program is heavily sought after.
In 2020, nearly 15 million applications covering more than 23 million people were filed.
Nearly 1.7 million of those applications came from Uzbekistan — about 5% of the country’s total population. Another 950,000 applications came from Sierra Leone, or more than 10% of its total population.
Supporters say the program is part of America’s soft power, giving people in far-flung places of the globe hope of attaining a place here.
Critics say the program is subject to fraud and offers little concrete value to the U.S. They have proposed either cutting those visas or reallocating them to immigrants coming for family reunification or employment.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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