The Trump administration has suspended the Diversity Visa lottery program in the aftermath of the Brown University and MIT shootings.
The Washington Post was reporting that President Trump had ordered the suspension of the U.S. green-card lottery program that authorities said was used to gain entrance to the United States by the gunman in the recent shootings at Brown University and at the home of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
The announcement was made Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem who used the word "pause" for a program which was initiated by Congress.
Reported the Post: "Two students were killed and nine others injured at Brown University on Dec. 13 when a man opened fire inside an engineering building. Two days later, Nuno Loureiro, 47, a professor of nuclear science and engineering, and of physics, was found shot dead at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, about 40 miles from Brown. The same gunman was responsible for the two incidents, authorities said."
The man identified as the shooter and who took his own life was a Portuguese national who secured a Green Card through the Diversity Visa program which goes by the formal designation DV1. Professor Nuno Loureiro was also Portuguese.
Added the Washington Post: "The shooter, 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, entered the U.S. in 2017 through that program, according to law enforcement authorities."
The program has been operating for two and a half decades and is virtually the only way that an Irish national hoping to live legally in the U.S. can apply for a visa that is non-specialized or specifically linked to a particular line of work.
50,000 of the visas have been allocated annually to applicants from countries judged to have low levels of immigrant access to the United States. Ireland is one of them and that's the entire island. While British nationals are excluded from the program, applications from Northern Ireland as well as the Republic are permitted.
However, the number of successful Irish applications has been very low in recent years as Irish hopefuls face significant competition from people is a host of countries across the world, particularly in Africa.
By way of example, there were only seventeen Irish recipients of a diversity visa in 2023. Irish applicants are invariably swamped by millions of applications from eligible countries around the world and the annual Irish allotment can, in the years of this century, be measured in mere dozens, with a couple of hundred visas counting as a standout year.
More than 14 million individuals applied for the program in 2021, the most recent years for which the State Department has data, the Rhode Island Current was reporting.
The DV1 program goes back to immigration legislation passed in 1990 with the Irish very much in mind. It is rooted in various visa programs that emerged in the late 1980s and early 90s with names attached such as Donnelly, Berman and Morrison.
The Donnelly Visa program in particular is seen as the basis for the Diversity Visas which took flight as the Schumer Diversity Visas, named after then Congressman and now Senator Charles Schumer.
Not surprisingly, Senator Schumer did not take kindly to the administration's suspension/pause.
Said the Senate Minority Leader in an initial statement: “It is sadly typical of Trump to exploit an awful tragedy to advance his virulent anti-legal immigration agenda rather than focusing on bringing those who break the law to justice.”
