President Trump Is Wrong To Include Religion With Attack on Diversity Visa

Diversity Visa Program Protects Immigration Populations

When Sayfullo Saipov plowed his vehicle through a dense cluster of pedestrians and bikers in New York, killing eight people, and injuring a further 11. he gave ammunition to the Trump administration in its efforts to stymie the Diversity Immigrant Visa program. This State Department program was created to diversify the ethnic and other nature of immigrants coming in and ultimately settling in the United States. President Trump wants to end this little-known visa program. He wants Congress to stop the program.

President Trump Is Wrong To Include Religion With Attack on Diversity Visa[/tweetthis]

President Donald J. Trump made a mistake when he blamed the Diversity Visa Program and its principal backer, Chuck Schumer, for the terrorist attack. The now 29-year-old Saipov entered the United States through this program. He was one of the 50,000 immigrants the United States grants visas each year. These visas are provided only to those whose home countries are under-represented in the American population mosaic. The US President wants to replace the Diversity program with a merit-based one. The fact is the Diversity program is one of the few remaining schemes through which a lot of whites entered the United States at one point in its history.

It is a misnomer that the Diversity program allows Islamic extremists to set foot on American soil. Saipov was an ordinary, non-extremist Muslim when he first flew into the United States. The distinctive nature which set him apart at that time was that he was a workaholic. Although he was not fluent in the English language, he had no shortage of work and came home only to sleep. He was known to his neighbors as a friendly person. He got married and three children came out of the union.

Saipov’s friends told investigators that only during the recent few years he expressed radical thought. He drifted away from his old friends. A mosque imam tried to deradicalize him by instructing the young man to learn about the true nature of Islam. Needless to say, his pleas fell on deaf ears.

The Diversity visa is actually a new scheme, becoming active only from 1990. It was inevitable that a transformative shift took place during the intervening years. The program was created to actually bring in whites from Europe, especially from Ireland and Italy. This was done primarily to ensure America remains ‘white’. However, with the improvement of the European economies, a fewer number of Europeans applied for US immigration visas. This gap was filled by Asians and North Africans, many of them arriving from Muslim dominant nations.

Resources

• The Hill
• JTA
• National Review
• LA Times
• Vox
• NJ
• CNN

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