EACH YEAR SINCE 1988, the federal government of the United States runs an unusual lottery--not a lottery that awards cash, but one that awards 50,000 visas to nationals of a special list of designated countries that are deemed "underrepresented" in the current legal immigration system. The lucky winners of the visa lottery are granted a visa to enter the United States, lawful permanent residence status (the coveted green card), and the recipients eventually qualify for naturalization. Many immigration analysts and others in the public may have heard by now of this small and obscure provision, (1) What is not known is the true origin of the provision including the impetus for its creation, and how far the program has strayed from its originally intended purpose. How did such a bizarre program that contradicts the philosophy of American immigration admissions become a temporary, and then later a permanent part of the Immigration and Nationality Act?

This article argues that the factors that created the push for the diversity lottery in existence today had its roots in the changed immigration patterns wrought by the Immigration Act of 1965. The diversity lottery idea actually dates much further back in time than the late 1980s when the program first met with legislative success. This article further argues that the chain of unanticipated consequences emanating from the 1965 Act led to the creation of the diversity lottery, a policy which itself, spawned further unintended consequences in the shifting group of beneficiaries. Using Congressional hearing reports, other government documents, and personal interviews with actors who took part in creating and implementing the diversity lottery, this article traces the creation and evolution of the lottery and the role of several key Congressmen who sought to create a policy to benefit their ethnic constituents in the time honored practice of pork barrel politics.

IMPACT OF THE 1965 ACT

To truly understand the reason for the existence of the diversity lottery today, one must understand the impetus for the policy that dates back to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 because today's lottery is actually a direct response to these changes. (2) The present lottery system is also a cobbling together of different concepts and strategies devised by many different Congressmen over the years who were responding to the changed immigration patterns.

The Immigration Act of 1965 was viewed as a watershed act and one of the most liberal and expansive reforms to the American system because of its abolition of race, ethnicity and national origin from the immigration selection process. (3) The 1965 Act revamped the entire immigration selection system by replacing national origin considerations with a seven-category preference system. This preference system prioritized immigrant admissions based primarily on close family relationships to a United States citizen or a lawful permanent resident (a greencard holder), and secondarily on considerations for employment skills. The 1965 Act completely abolished race, ethnicity and national origin as criteria for immigrant admissions and replaced it with the...