Visa lottery: Free tickets to the Promised Land!

U.S. Department of State Form 062236394652,
Notice of Prize: U.S. Citizenship.
Odds of winning: 50,000 out of 6.4 million.

The New York Daily News, a trashy tabloid, carries an "Immigration Advice" column in its print edition (no link that I could find). According to the December 28 column:

The U.S. Department of State reported that it received more than 6.4 million entries for the 50,000 visas available through [the] 2008 Diversity Visa Lottery. … Adding entrants' family members, more than 10 million people are trying to get permanent residence through this year's lottery. The largest number of applicants were from Bangladesh (more than 1.7 million applicants), followed by Nigeria (684,735) and Ukraine (619,584).

In other words, the U.S. government believes the country is so lacking in diversity that it must hand out 50,000 "citizenships" plus thousands of additional "citizenships" for the lucky winners' families every year. I put "citizenships" in quotes because using this terminology turns the very concept of citizenship into a joke: a lottery prize, based on nothing whatever except the desire of millions of people deemed sufficiently diverse to come soak up whatever they can from the legacy of wealth created by earlier generations of Americans. It's a better deal than an Irish Sweepstakes ticket, which you have to pay for (and pay taxes on your winnings).

When I was in New York last week, I rode the city buses and subways. Of the conversations I overheard, perhaps one of five was in English. True, some of the people I heard may have been tourists from non-English speaking countries, but it cuts both ways: some of the English speakers might have been English-speaking, or English-as-a-second-language-speaking, American tourists.

But maybe Bangladeshis, Nigerians, and Ukranians were, as the liberal quota hawks like to say, "underrepresented" in the subway crush. So, based on the logic of social engineering, we must hand out "citizenship" so that every nationality is found in the United States in strict proportion to its percentage of the world population. If, let us say, Madagascar has 0.35 percent of the people on earth, we must send out a dragnet to bring in enough Madagascarans to make them 0.35 percent of the United States population.

A few dozen more Diversity Visa Lotteries and the quaintly termed United States will be … wait for it … the whole world in microcosm! We are the world! All we need to add to the mix is to lure Kofi Annan out of retirement (we can easily offer him a rakeoff to top what he skimmed from UN programs) as our leader, with a few dozen old Brussels hands to write our laws, triple the number of government agencies and quangos, and Heaven on Earth is ours.

Play the planetary lottery. You could win a country as a prize. Hey, you never know.