Does a bad idea become a good idea by becoming an actualized idea and a legal reality? Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin might ask this question about legal immigration, which she has proposed halting completely, at least for a time. Author of the new book Open Borders Inc.: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction? Malkin has also implored conservatives to move beyond “kindergarten” thinking on immigration and has warned of “diversity lottery” visas, which she calls “suicidal.”
Most Americans know little about the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, also known as the “green card lottery” or just “diversity lottery.” Part of the Immigration Act of 1990 — which was introduced by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and signed into law by President G.H.W. Bush, and which increased overall immigration — its aim was to “diversify” the United States’ immigrant population.
See a red flag here? So does commentator Jamie Glazov, who called the program “deadly” in a Thursday post. Glazov highlights a speech by Malkin in which she lamented how people will “declaim that they are against illegal immigration and for legal immigration.” Calling this “kindergarten thinking,” she pointed out that all 19 9/11 hijackers “came through the front door” — legally — “the vast majority of them” through the diversity lottery program.
Speaking in Beverly Hills for the David Horowitz Freedom Center on October 15, Malkin pointed out that other terrorists have gained entry via the program as well (read more about this here). The issue is that the “lottery” program is just what it sounds like: You don’t need any skills or abilities or even a high-school education to qualify — just the right color/ethnicity/religion and luck.
So it’s the “immigration version of affirmative action,” as Malkin put it in 2017, in which “underrepresented groups from around the world have their own quota system.” But question: Should the goal of immigration policy be to make the United States “look like the world”?
Of course, if you want it to be indistinguishable from the world so it can be melded into “one world,” you’ll say yes.
Saying no, however, Malkin lamented in her speech that handing “out the privilege of coming into this country randomly, like the lotto, is probably the most insane thing that I’ve heard any sovereign country consider doing” (video below).
The diversity lottery allows up to 55,000 luck-of-the-draw people into America annually, amounting to up to 1.6 million since 1990. Yet it’s even worse than it sounds. As Malkin wrote in 2017, the program puts the “affirmative action” immigrants
on the path to American citizenship ahead of millions of other foreigners patiently waiting to come to this country. The green card lotto winners’ spouses and unmarried children under 21 all get lottery passes into the country, too, no matter where they were born. Chain migration extends the families’ winnings. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Justice Department investigators recently discovered one Somali woman who won the DV lottery and subsequently recruited an entire fake family, including a phony husband and two fictitious adult children, all of whom came to the United States and later gained U.S. citizenship based on their false claims.
A U.N. probe found human traffickers forcing dozens of diversity visa lottery winners into listing young female sex slaves as their “family members” to gain entry in the U.S.
And a State Department official testified in 2011 that in Bangladesh, “one agent is reported to have enrolled an entire phone book so that he could then either extort money from winning applicants who had never entered the program to begin with or sell their winning slots to others.”
Returning to Malkin’s speech, she also addressed immigration in general. For example, mentioning the “fissures…in our civic culture — the balkanization of the school system, the impact of the open-borders-infrastructures Cloward-Piven strategy … of completely overwhelming our health, education, welfare, public safety and national security systems,” she reiterated her call for “a complete immigration moratorium” so we can “take a breather.”
Does this sound radical? Well, see if you can name the given phenomenon based on the following description:
• creates a strain on infrastructure, services, and resources;
• increases our population;
• causes demographic change and balkanization;
• drives down wages; and
• empowers socialist demagogues, as 70 to 90 of the Third World people will ultimately vote Democrat.
If you guessed “illegal migration,” that’s not a bad answer. But the above even more accurately describes legal immigration. As I’ve long said, illegal migration is not the problem — it’s an exacerbation of the problem.
As the New York Times recently boasted, immigration has flipped Virginia blue, and pundit Ann Coulter has correctly pointed out that it’s causing the whole nation to gradually follow suit. So is diversity — a euphemism for division and, actually, balkanization — really a strength? Or is it “our downfall,” as Malkin stated in 2017?
Note that the Roman Empire had tremendous diversity, but dissolved when its iron fist weakened. It long ago disappeared. China has relatively little diversity and is one of the world’s oldest civilizations, with the Chinese people, Chinese language, and Chinese culture remaining through thick and thin. It’s still around.
At the end of the day, if America is going to “look like the world,” why do we need an America? Of course, maybe that’s the whole idea.
Photo of Michelle Malkin: Gage Skidmore
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
