Good news on the Diversity Visa Lottery vote!

The bill to kill the Diversity Visa Lottery was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee yesterday reports NumbersUSA.  (I told you about the bill here last week).

Just a refresher:  The Diversity Visa program run by the US State Department and created in 1990 by who else but Senator Ted Kennedy “welcomes” 50,000 additional immigrants a year to the US through a lottery system (because we don’t have enough diversity!).   Go here for a minute and look at the countries allowed to send “diversity” in the 2011 lottery—top countries include Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Kenya and Bangladesh.  (Why are applicants from certain countries ineligible? see below)*

I know I sound like a broken record, but it’s important that grassroots activists stop saying “legal” immigration is O.K.  There are huge LEGAL and often fraud-infested immigration programs that are, as NumbersUSA is telling us, allowing too many immigrants to enter the US at this time in our history.  NumbersUSA talks about the numbers in a couple of eye-opening video lessons here and here.

From Roy Beck yesterday about the victory in the House Judiciary Committee:

After three years of a Jobs Depression, we saw today the first action by Congress to stop driving up unemployment by importing so many immigrant workers.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 19-11 just before noon to pass H.R. 704, the SAFE for America Act, to end the Visa Lottery. (See roll call at bottom of blog.)

If we can get this passed on the House floor and then in the Senate and signed into law by Pres. Obama this year, that will mean 55,000 fewer permanent work permits will be handed out next year to immigrants. (And 550,000 fewer over the next decade.)

It would be a good start to finally start dialing back the exorbitant annual immigration numbers that routinely run over a million a year (while 22 million Americans who want a full-time job can’t find one).

BI-PARTISAN HOUSE MAJORITY VOTED TO KILL LOTTERY IN 2005 (but no Senator forced a vote)

This very same legislation by Rep. Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.) passed 273-148 with a large bi-partisan majority on Dec. 16, 2005 at 7:08 p.m.

It was an amendment to the large Sensenbrenner Immigration Bill.

Only six Republicans voted to continue the Visa Lottery.

And 57 Democrats voted with most Republicans to kill the lottery.

This was before the Jobs Depression!

Our hope would be that once the bill comes to the floor that similar numbers of Democrats would break with their Leadership’s insistence on flooding the country with foreign labor.

But we have to persuade the current House Republican leadership to give this bill some priority and bring it to the floor. The 2005 bill died in the Republican-held Senate because not one Senator would invest the effort to force the bill to the floor of the Senate.

ARE HOUSE REPUBLICANS FINALLY SHOWING SOME SYMPATHY FOR PLIGHT OF UNEMPLOYED?

In power for seven months now, the new House Republican leadership until today has been no action and only a tiny bit of talk when it comes to some kind of sympathy for 22 million U6-category unemployed Americans having to compete with an extra 1 million LEGAL immigrants every year.

It is a good sign that Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) put such an important spotlight on the Visa Lottery in the middle of the debt debate which has grabbed almost all attention this month.

There is more!  Read it all!

For Marylanders, note here that neither of our Republican Members of the House have co-sponsored this bill yet!   We need to let Rep. Roscoe Bartlett and Rep. Andy Harris know that they need to co-sponsor H.R. 704, the SAFE for America Act! 

Rep. Goodlatte of Virginia has championed the bill for years.  Those of you from Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia should go to the co-sponsor list here and see if your Representatives have signed on.

*Ineligible countries according to wikipedia:

Those born in any territory that has sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the previous five years are not eligible to receive a diversity visa. For DV-2012, natives of the following nations are ineligible: Brazil, Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam.