US President Donald Trump has called for the green card lottery to be scrapped, saying it allowed the New York truck attack suspect into the US.
The scheme is popular with Nigerians, Australians, with the most recent statistics showing that more than 20,000 Australians apply each year to live and work in the US.
The President instead said he wants to introduce an Australian style merit-based immigration system.
“I am today starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program,†Trump told reporters in Washington.
“I’m going to ask Congress to immediately initiate work to get rid of this program.
“Diversity lottery. Sounds nice. It’s not nice. It’s not good. It hasn’t been good. We’ve been against it. So we want to immediately work with Congress … on terminating it, getting rid of it.â€
The move comes after it was revealed that the man behind Tuesday’s deadly truck rampage in lower Manhattan was an Uzbek national who gained entry to the US in 2010 legally via the green card lottery.
The lottery provides 50,000 immigrant visas each year via a lottery. According to Australia’s US embassy, the scheme aims to diversify the US population by choosing applicants mostly from countries with low rates of immigration to the country.
Trump said he wanted to replace the lottery with a “merit-basedâ€Â program that would halt “chain migrationâ€, which is the process by which immigrants take friends and family with them into the US.
Trump described the alleged terrorist Sayfullo Saipov, 29, as an “animalâ€Â and claimed US chain migration rules may have allowed him to bring 23 others to the US.
According to the most recent statistics, 20,579 Australians applied for a green card in 2015 and 1798 were successful.
Credit: informationng.com
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