Friend of Diversity Lottery: Program’s Migrants Are Bottom of Barrel

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In this case the friend of the program is Dr. Onoso Ikphemi Imoagene, who has one degree from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, another from Cambridge, and two, including a PhD, from Harvard. She is an assistant professor of sociology at another Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania.

Imoagene has recently published an article in International Migration, the scholarly journal of Switzerland-based, open-borders organization the International Organization for Migration. The article was entitled “Affecting Lives: How Winning the US Diversity Lottery Impacts DV Migrants Pre- and Post-Migration” (largely behind a paywall). Note the “for” in the organization’s name, and the focus in the title on the migrants, rather than their impact on the United States.

From her credentials, her ties to IOM, and the title of her article, one can safely assume that Imoagene is not a restrictionist. Her report is based on lengthy interviews with 61 visa lottery winners from Ghana and Nigeria.

It’s an interesting article. She makes the point that most of the visa lottery winners are quite unprepared to come to the United States, that many are in college when they win, and that winning thus disrupts their education. Further, she states that the whole visa lottery process — which must be completed in a year — is different from many other migration processes that are smoother because of the opportunity for advanced planning. She indicates that most visa lottery winners have scant support networks in the United States and recommends that they receive government-funded, refugee-like services from our refugee-support systems.

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Of the 61 respondents (admittedly not a random sample) seven of the winners presumably sold a part of their visa, in effect, to another alien, making that person a spouse for visa lottery migration purposes. This process is described as “planned divorce (dissolution of temporary alliances).”

In addition, or perhaps overlapping, there were four instances of “Unexpected Divorce: (used for papers — asked for a divorce upon arrival in U.S., evidence of adultery as a DNA test proved child of union was not biological offspring).”

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She also wrote: “[C]ontrolling for human capital and other variables, I found that in the pooled sample of immigrants from all over the world, DV migrants fared the worst of all immigrants across the four main classes of admission: employer-based, family reunification [i.e., chain migration], diversity visa, and refugees.” (Emphasis added.)

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Thus, we have a distinguished friend of migration with splendid credentials, using a totally establishmentarian database, saying that as a class, the visa lottery migrants are the bottom of the barrel and that many of the winners engaged in fraud.

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