Four years of the Biden administration‘s unprecedented porous border policies have rightly left a majority of Americans determined to put an end to illegal immigration. They are more than ready to lock the national backdoor and restore the rule of law to the movement of foreigners into the United States.

President Donald Trump fiercely opposes illegal immigrants entering and staying in the U.S., but his mood on legal arrivals seems to swing back and forth. He seems caught up in the usual confused American ethos on immigration, and like many of his countrymen, he has not fully thought through the consequences of the country’s out-of-date laws or the fact that the government’s people-importing business contains more than its share of unappetizing sausage-making.

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One piece of America’s legal immigration complex that is overdue for the waste bin is the so-called Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, which Congress created in 1990 based on the quaint notion that the U.S. was being deprived because some countries were not sending enough migrants. If that pretext — lack of diversity of immigrants — were true 3 1/2 decades ago, it most certainly is no longer. 

With this dubious justification, Congress launched the visa program, which for some 35 years has brought America around 50-55,000 immigrants annually. Efforts in Congress over the years and attempts by the first Trump administration to kill or slow down the program have all failed. Its people-importing process is on automatic pilot and keeps powering along. The State Department — sun rise, sun set — has already announced the application rules for the visa program in 2026. 

Some might think the program admission figure is small potatoes — a negligible fraction of the million-a-year standard that is currently the U.S. norm for legal immigration. But just as smart bankers point to the power of compounded interest, thoughtful immigration observers never forget the multiplying force of chain migration enabled by the Immigration and Nationality Act, which uniquely empowers recently arrived immigrants to bring in their extended families as additional immigrants.

Consider this: The yearly visa program arrival of 50-55,000 over three decades has delivered some 1.5 million new legal permanent residents to American communities. These 1.5 million immigrants, empowered by the Immigration and Nationality Act, have petitioned to bring in parents, siblings, and other relatives. Family members then repeat the chain migration dynamic year after year, likely adding another couple of million arrivals to the national ledger.  

A diversity skeptic might rightly ask how many millions of people, even in vast America, it takes to overcome any perceived gaps in humanity’s richness? One valuable lesson in this is that, in the future, Congress must find a way to sunset all legal immigration statutes.

There is another reason to end the visa program: It is the root cause of massive fraud and scam activities worldwide. Yearly, some 20 million foreigners submit online entries to the State Department, hoping that they might be selected as a winner of a diversity visa. It does not take a sophisticated criminal mind to see the potential in defrauding so many would-be migrants hoping to be selected for a prized visa awarded via an opaque selection process managed by a State Department contractor.  

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In scores of countries ruled by corrupt practices, including Nigeria, Albania, Egypt, Bangladesh (the list is long), the criminal enterprises that spring up to invent visa-related scams are a legion and virtually unstoppable. The State Department has flagged this visa-related crime in numerous reports, and while U.S. embassies and consulates abroad are not involved in such corruption, local officials often are. Most outrageously, many of the victims of the flimflam actually believe it is all sanctioned by a cynical U.S. government. 

America has more than 50 million inhabitants who were not born in the country, which his more than 15% of the total population. We do not need the visa program to expand our country’s diversity or to increase the total number of immigrants.

Phillip Linderman is a retired State Department senior Foreign Service officer.