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Immigration and the American Green Card Lottery

Ghanaians are a scattered race. There are jokes about the migrant Ghanaian that might sound as true as the gospel truth. This choice of country of abode is determined by availability of opportunities such as education, jobs and peace.

It is said that there is no sand on earth which the sole of the Ghanaian foot has not kissed. Some say that if one is looking for a black man to dig snow from one’s car runway in Greenland, two Ghanaian handymen are likely to come forward to compete for the job. Others say that the best charcoal producers in the Australian outback are Ghanaians.

Just the other day a friend wisecracked that a black man called Kofi has been crowned “The illegal chicken farmhand- hene” in Korea while the most acclaimed nuclear physicist in South Korea is a Ghanaian who resides in a house opposite Don’t Mind Your Wife Chop Bar a popular eatery in Daegu.

There is no doubt that wherever Ghanaians live and whatever they do for their living, they apply themselves assiduously to it.

While everyone knows that the population of Africans in the Diaspora is very huge, solid data on African immigrants is very sketchy because a lot of the immigration had been accomplished illegally and many do not bother to register with their embassies in foreign countries.

But if one were inquisitive, one could get an idea of the extent of immigration by looking through the “Transitions” column of any popular newspaper in Africa. One would be struck by the fact that practically every deceased person seemed to have a member or an acquaintance living abroad.

In a certain era, immigration, including indentured labour, was tacitly encouraged by receiving countries. Immigration was needed to play a positive role in the labour market.

The migrant sweat was necessary to build their economies in the manufacturing, construction and agricultural sectors. In those days, technologies were at their very rudimentary stages and automation had not taken away manual interventions.

Colonial masters such as Britain and France were used to receiving and accommodating unrestricted numbers of citizens of their empires as they were useful for their economies.

It was also a manifestation of a shared heritage. The situation was similar in a relatively new nation such as the US with its vast potentials for expansion in every field.

Starting first with African slave labour, she welcomed large populations uprooted by the World Wars. It appeared then that there was no limit to immigration to America and the acquisition of permanent American citizenship.

The attraction of countries such as Germany, Italy and Scandinavia that have not had a long colonial history to immigrants is jobs. Sometimes, the lucky migrant may obtain foreign citizenship status. The migration traffic to the Middle East is not very much relished but good oil money serves as the driver. The immigrants do not think of citizenship. The Arab cultures would not encourage it.

This situation has changed with the once-great economies of Europe and the US that are under a pall of unemployment. These nations have had to adopt policies that attempt to stem the immigration tide. While application of quota in the US and Canada has been successful to some extent, policies tried by other countries have simply not worked.

“We are a monolithic race. We are not like the US where there is motley of genes. We cannot be America.” This was how a Japanese friend expressed his views about immigration when the issue was becoming very topical in the mid-1990s. It was the time the American Green Card Lottery also called the Diversity Visa Lottery had been introduced in the US and it was the time Japan was getting alarmed by illegal immigration of Blacks into their island.

What is the Green Card Lottery? The US has for a long time welcomed immigrants. The US needed the population for her productive development. Regrettably, the US was getting deluged by foreigners, many of whom still enter the country without legal documentation. To regulate immigration the US Government allotted a quota of 55,000 visas annually awarded randomly to foreigners.

However, it became clear that many Africans and Soviets found immigration to the US quite difficult. Thus a lottery system has been instituted since 1995 to facilitate immigration of such people. For eligibility, the applicants must be natives of the eligible nations. They must have had high school education and two years’ working experience that involved a minimum of two years’ training. Indeed there is no Ghanaian who does not know someone who has won the Green Card Lottery. This shows how popular this mode of migration control is with Ghanaians in particular and Africans at large.

After many years of assessment, the US House of Representatives has approved a bill by 245 to 139 in December 2012 to scrap the lottery. In effect, June 2013 would be the last draw and October 2013 would see the last issue of lottery green cards to the winners. Instead of the lottery, the 55,000 visas would be issued to foreign graduates of American Universities with Masters or PhD degrees in Science and Technology. Whereas the original green card lottery required only a High

School education and no requirement for ability to speak English, the envisaged reform insists on a higher qualification in science and technology and proficiency in English.

Implicitly, the US lawmakers are aiming for high skill immigration. They do not need the brawns for “walatu-walasa” or indeed the skills of Arts graduates. Therefore it would be bye, bye to the Green Card Lottery.

One of the arguments for this switch is that the US would like to offer foreigners American citizenship so that they would not return home to work for competitors to the US Economy. Clearly, one sees the floodgates of a brain drain for citizens whose contribution may be lost forever to their native countries.

Immigration has been an emotional subject with many clashing theories about the advantages and disadvantages. In all the arguments, the economy is paramount.

In the past every destination country benefited and so has every immigrant. The cultural diversity that followed migration was also considered a positive gain. Now, modern theories distilled from years of social research are showing that immigration impacts negatively on the earning power of the born-native of the receiving country.

In extreme cases, immigration causes unemployment. It also stretches facilities, creates tension and causes tension and instability in the receiving state. Any control policy by a nation must be viewed in that light.

Article by Joe Frazier

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