Onoso Imoagene is the author of the RSF book Structured Luck: Downstream Effects of the U.S. Diversity Visa Program. In Structured Luck, Imoagene uses West African immigrants’ stories to show the two sides to the winning coin of the U.S. Diversity Immigrant Visa (DV) Program. While the program is a tool of upward mobility for many diversity immigrants and their family members, the program’s design often leads to their exploitation in their origin countries, the interruption of their education, and reduced potential once they are in the United States. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Imoagene is an associate professor of social research and public policy at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She is a former RSF visiting scholar.
Q. What motivated you to write Structured Luck? What is the U.S. Diversity Immigrant Visa Program? Why should we study it and the experiences of West African diversity immigrants?
One of my key motivations of writing Structured Luck was to understand the downstream effects of immigration policies coming out of rich, advanced countries in the Global North. The U.S. Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, I would say, is just a case—one particular immigration policy that has been studied. Other countries, England, Canada, Germany, even where I am now in the Middle East, all these countries have similar policies. The issues that I raise in Structured Luck also are relevant and applicable to the immigration policies coming out of these countries.
I saw, over years, that the immigration policies coming out of the West, or the Global North, are intruding and intervening in—or interjecting themselves—into the lives and communities of citizens in the poorer, less economically advantaged countries in the Global South. And I wanted to understand what the impacts were, particularly because I felt that the impact of these immigration policies weren't only felt when the immigrants arrived in their destination country but were felt even before these immigrants left the shores of their home countries. So, that's really what motivated me to write Structured Luck.
I think another reason why is that the U.S. Diversity Visa Program, which is popularly known as the U.S. visa lottery or U.S. lotto, is very popular in certain countries in Africa. Particularly in Nigeria, before Nigeria was no longer eligible, in Ghana, in Cameroon, in Togo. Extremely popular, to such an extent that it's become an annual event. Just to give you a little idea of how popular it is, in fiscal year 2013 Nigeria and Ghana together combined to submit 28% of the valid entries for the DV program. That was just two countries out of over 165 countries whose citizens were eligible to apply for the DV. And in 2015, Ghana by itself was the top applicant sending country—6.4% of the Ghanaian population applied or registered for the DV. That's amazing when you think about the fact that the DV program is restricted to individuals 18 years and above. So, just to understand why it has become a cultural and annual event and to understand the impacts of the policy, were also some other reasons that motivated me to write the book Structured Luck.
Now, the U.S. Diversity Immigrant Visa Program has been described as a global game of chance by Carly Goodman, a historian who has also studied and written about the history of the program. The objective of the program, according to the United States, was to increase the diversity of its immigrant streams. And so, they wanted to give citizens of countries, whom the U.S. regarded as underrepresented in the United States, an opportunity to register and go through a lottery process. And if chosen in the lottery, have the right to apply for a permanent resident visa, an immigrant visa.
When you just look at the bare bones of the program. It awards 50,000 immigrant visas each year. Every year, right now, on average, about 15 to 20 million individuals around the whole world—from countries that are still eligible—register for it. It was paper based when it started in 1990; it went fully operational in 1995. It went online in 2003. The registration period begins in October of every year and closes after about four weeks in November. The following year, individuals whose names were chosen in the lottery system are published on an online website, and then those individuals are the ones that then have the right to apply for an immigrant visa. They start putting in the applications for their visa in the fiscal year after May, so into August or September.
I would say that one of the key things about the DV program is that, even though it is a lottery, it has an educational requirement. Individuals have to have at least the equivalent of a high school diploma, which for many other countries, is six years of secondary school and five passing grades in maths and English and three other subject areas.
I think the reasons why we should study the program is that, despite it being in existence for basically three decades or more, not much is known about the immigrants that have come in through the DV, the experiences they have had in the United States, or even before they arrive, and the challenges and the benefits of the program. So, that’s one of the reasons why we should study it, because it will increase our understanding of the immigrants that are coming into the United States.
The DV program was lobbied for by an Irish immigration group called the Irish Immigrant Reformation Movement that formed in 1987. They are the ones that actually lobbied the U.S. government to give them a program that will give legal status, permanent visas, to individuals who were residing in and or undocumented in the United States. They were making the case for the Irish immigrants that had come into the United States in the 1980s and had arrived after the period that was granted amnesty during the IRCA bill [Immigration Reform and Control Act] that was passed during Ronald Reagan's administration.
The program served the Irish immigrants who lobbied for it very well in the beginning stages, particularly the precursors of the DV in the run up to when it went into full effect in 1995. But since that time, the program has morphed to now be a main avenue for African immigrants to come into the United States. So right now, about 30% to 35% of the 50,000 visas given every year are awarded to African immigrants. Another 30% to 35% are awarded to immigrants coming out of Europe. But the Europe they're coming out from now are largely the countries that were once part of the old Soviet Union. So, you're talking of countries like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan. You're talking of Belarus. These are the top sending countries out of Europe now. So, it’s no longer the traditional countries like Italy or Switzerland or Norway or Sweden or the United Kingdom.
And so, one reason why we should study it is because the DV is basically driving the increase in the African population in the United States. It allows those who come in with the DV to now be able to establish themselves and help move other members of their families to the United States. So, it has a significance. It has a flow on effect. Even if the actual numbers who win the DV, 50,000, seem quite small compared to the over 1 million individuals who get legal, permanent resident status in the United States every year, when you think about the fact that they are able to then bring other family members you see the significance that it has in establishing and maintaining immigrant diversity in the U.S.
Q. How do diversity immigrants fare in comparison to other immigrants that arrive in the U.S. through other programs?
This was the most surprising thing to me as I started doing the project and studying the Diversity Visa immigrants. When I started talking to them, I was expecting to hear really joyous stories. Because you think “What are the chances of winning a lottery?” The chances are very small. It's a question of luck. People who win the DV feel they are lucky. And they are, when we define luck as when the chances of winning something is very small, and that your chances of winning are outside of your control. Which are two things that that are applicable to the visa lottery. And so, people who win the DV consider themselves fortunate. They see themselves as very lucky. And the United States, in a way, also treats them as individuals who are lucky, because it's like you've won the golden ticket, you've won a great prize. “Okay, now come to the United States and just take care of yourself.”
As I wrote in my book, someone said that the language around the visa lottery is very peculiar, because it's a language of play, a language of luck. A language of, “Oh, what do I have to lose?” The consequences of actually registering for the program are not really understood. People don’t really understand what it would mean when they actually win. And the United States, in a way, because it also has the language of play about the visa lottery, thinks about the DV green card as a jackpot. The U.S. also does not really think about how much support they should give to the immigrants who win it.
And so, when I started studying DV immigrants, I began to hear stories of disruption—a lot of disruption in their lives, which was tied to winning the visa lottery. Particularly disruption in education. Many individuals who won the DV while they were in university couldn't afford to buy multiple tickets to come into the United States to prevent their green cards from expiring; their families didn't have much money. They ended up having to abandon their degree programs to come to the United States to make use of the visa, because the visa expires if you don't use it within six months. And there are also no rollovers, so you can’t defer your green card.
And then I was hearing about family disruptions; creating transnational families, where individuals who won it and were married and had two, three, four children didn't have money to buy all those tickets for their family members. So, the families decided and told the principal winner, “You go first and survey the land, and then when you are settled, you'll be able to bring us over.” And many of them did not know that if you do not bring your family over, even if they got the visa within the fiscal year in which your DV win is linked to, then you lose that opportunity and you're not able to bring your family again until you either become a legal permanent resident or a U.S. citizen, which can take some time. It’s better for you to wait until you become a United States citizen before you apply for your spouse and your children to join you, than to do it when you're a legal permanent resident because that takes more years. And so, I found this creation of transnational families where the father or the mother is in the United States and the spouse and their children are waiting back home. I found examples of marital instability where people were going through divorces as a result of winning the DV. It was very surprising to me.
And so, one of the things I wanted to see was if this was something that was unique to my population of West African immigrants who were Nigerian and Ghanaian, or if this was actually a global story, in that all DV immigrants coming from all other regions of the world also had experiences that were quite distinct from other legal immigrants. And so, I got access to the restricted data for the New Immigrant Survey, the NIS survey out of Princeton. Two of the principal investigators are Douglas Massey and Guillermina Jasso.
In the United States, there are four classes of admission of legal immigrants—individuals who come in with an immigrant visa. You have those who are sponsored by their employer, we call those employer-sponsored immigrants. You have those who have their families file for them, so the family reunification category. That has those who are coming in as spouses, who are getting their immigrant visa because they’re married to a U.S. citizen or a legal permanent resident of the U.S. Or those who are coming in because they are parents of a U.S. citizen. And then you also have those who are coming in as siblings. So, you have that category. Then you also have those who come into the United States as refugees and asylees. And then you have the diversity immigrants.
I used the New Immigrant Survey to see how the diversity immigrants were doing in the labor market compared to the other three category groups of legal immigrants. And from the research on immigrant adaptation, the expectation when you model how these immigrants will do in the labor market is that employer-sponsored immigrants who come in with a visa sponsored by their employer—a lot of them are H-1B immigrants who have transitioned to a green card, or medical doctors whose organizations sponsor them to get a green card—the expectation is that they will do the best in the labor market. Followed by the diversity immigrants because the diversity immigrants are educated immigrants since there's an educational requirement. The DV requires that you have at least a high school diploma or equivalent or have a skill, be an artisan—a skill that required at least two years of an apprenticeship. It's then expected that family immigrants who fall into the family reunification category will do the third best in the labor market. And then that refugees and asylees will be last because refugees and asylees normally come into the United States with limited financial, human, and social capital because many of them are displaced. They are running away from hardships, whichever way it presents for them.
I was absolutely surprised when I ran my regression models on my longitudinal data that diversity visa immigrants did the least well. They did worse than refugees and asylees in the labor market at Time One. And I was like, “Wow, why is that? What happened?” It just basically confirmed the story of disruption that I was hearing in my qualitative interviews from my West African respondents. I would say that to understand what's going on, why they are doing the least well—even though they recover by Time Two, three to five years later, and sort of attain parity—is that we have to think about immigrants and their settlements in terms of the social support they have.
Diversity immigrants stand on one side of the spectrum. Most do not have any support. Some might have a father, a parent, or a sibling who is well established in the United States, and so that helps them. But a feature of the program is that it allows independent immigrants, individuals who would not have had an opportunity to come into the United States, to come in. And so, diversity immigrants stand alone in that sense. When you think about the employer-sponsored immigrants, they have wages, they have a salary, they have the support of their employer. You think about family reunification immigrants, they have their family members to be able to support them, provide room and board, give them information about where to go find a job, link them up with their own social networks to help them find jobs. Refugees and asylees get financial and non-financial help from the government. They get welfare benefits. They get a stipend. And then there are a lot of charity organizations that work with them to support them. And so those individuals are able to connect them, outside of their own ethnic enclaves or their ethnic groups, to help settle communities and individuals. To be able to help them find jobs or settle their children in school quickly. But diversity visa immigrants are basically left to sink or swim. They come into the United States, all they have to provide the federal government is an address where they should send their green card, and they are left alone. That's one of the reasons I feel that lack of support is one of the things that helps explain why they didn't do as well as expected in the first few years of their residence in the United States.
Q. Can you speak briefly about the state of contemporary Nigeria and Ghana? What are some of the reasons that Nigerians and Ghanaians want to emigrate from their home countries?
I was in Nigeria this Christmas break, in December, and things are tough there. I think the reason why many people want to migrate out of many of these less economically advantaged countries in Africa is that life is tough. Life is hard there. There are few jobs. Unemployment rates are very high. Youth unemployment rates in many of these countries is hovering at 40% to 50%. And I think that's even an undercount. The disparity between these countries’ currencies and the U.S. dollar is just so wide and it's it keeps widening. The currencies are losing value so quickly. For example, when the government of Bola Tinubu went into office, I believe it's just 2024, it was 750 Naira to $1. As I speak now, it’s 1,600 Naira to $1, meaning the Naira has lost more than 100% in its value in less than a year.
There comes a time where it becomes an economic necessity, a survival strategy, to have to leave. To find one or two people in your family who would leave, to be able to send migradollars for the other members of the family to be able to survive. There's a term being used in Nigeria—some people might have heard it—called japa, or the japa syndrome. Or people say, “I'm japa-ing.” It has its roots in the Yoruba language, and it means you have to flee, you have to run away, in a sense. And people are just saying they have to flee the economic hardships that are present in their country. There's even a Nollywood movie right now about japa that might be of interest to people.
I saw a blogger, a Nigerian blogger, Sunday Adebayo. He was writing a blog when he was in South Africa, and he was making a play on the whole thing of The American Dream. And he said The Nigerian Dream is to leave Nigeria. That's basically the dream. And it is true, that's really what it is. And I spoke to those in Ghana, they said the same thing. That the youths—everyone—is looking to and dreaming of exit.
Q. How do Nigerians and Ghanaians typically hear about the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program? What is the application process? Can you talk briefly about the decision-making process when deciding to apply for the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program?
Nigerians and Ghanaians—and many people—typically hear about the DV from people in their social network. They can hear about it from family members. Their parents might tell children, “Come, I found this form.” “My colleague at work sold me this form that will give you an opportunity to go to the United States. Come and fill it.” Individuals might be in their workplaces, and someone brings in a sheaf of forms and tells them, “Oh, let's fill this.” The DV becomes almost like office pools in the U.S. when we see how people in an office pool their money to buy Mega Millions or Powerball tickets. It's almost coming to be that kind of event in some workplaces. You have pastors and belief leaders sending out texts saying, “Oh, the registration period has opened” to their members on WhatsApp and their different church platforms. And so, people hear about it that way.
When I was in Ghana, I went to observe the registration period in October to November 2017, I was talking my Ghanaian friend’s research assistant. He told me it's six degrees of separation, that's there's always someone that knows someone that knows someone who won the DV. It might be your sister, it might be a sibling, it might be a cousin. It might be a friend of a friend of a friend. A college mate. By knowing someone, however close or distant, who won the DV, it makes it real. It's no longer like a fantastic story. It reassures people that it's not a fraud. And so, that's why they are motivated to play.
Other people hear about the DV through jingles. There are some businesses that pay for radio jingles to say, “The U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery Program is here again. This is the time to register.” If you walk some streets in different African countries, including Ghana, there are street tents on the side of the road in busy public transportation hubs. People are just going about their business, and they see the tent, and they're like, “Oh yeah, let me play.” And they go in and pay the money, the equivalent of three to four US dollars. And they say, “Let us play. Let's register. Let's try our luck.” And so that's another way that people tend to hear and play the DV.
One last thing I'll say here, is that people also get notices from members of their family and friends in the diaspora. They tell them, “I might not be able to apply for you to come to the United States or to Europe, but at least I can give you this application. Let me put this right in front of you as a possible avenue for you to be able to come to the U.S.”
Now in terms of the application process, it is free. Officially, it is free to register for the DV. Now that it's online, individuals who are computer savvy should be able to navigate to the U.S. State Department website, find the right website, take a digital picture, upload their digital photo, and put in the necessary information and submit their form. That's the way to register for the DV. But the fact of life is that many people aren’t computer literate. Many people aren’t connected to the internet in certain parts of the world. So, what we might take for granted in the United States, that people are computer savvy and literate and 90% of the population, or even more, have access to the internet, is not true in many of these African countries. And so, you have a lot of people, organizations, businesses, private individuals who have made a business of it. A cottage industry has emerged to help individuals register for the DV for a fee. And in that way, they are making some profit off this U.S. immigration policy.
I asked my respondents why they played the DV. And many of them told me people persuaded them to do so, as I said. Others said that they wanted to travel overseas. Some of them just wanted to travel, and they heard this was a good way. Some wanted to travel but didn't want to travel without papers because they had heard stories of the challenges of being undocumented in the United States and other countries, even England. So, they were like, “Oh, wow, this one will allow me to travel as a legal resident. I will take this one. I will try my luck here.”
But then after registering for the DV—you choose to submit the application, you choose to bring out your three to four U.S. dollars to pay a visa agent to help you—after you get notified that you have been selected in the lottery, you then also have to decide if you want to go through the lengthy, torturous process of applying for the immigrant visa. You have to obtain a police report, you have to get your education transcripts, you have to go pay for a medical examination, you have to go through a US consular interview. You have to decide if you're going to do this. And obviously, for many people, when they hear they have been selected in the lottery, their families put so much pressure on them because they see it as a family win, and so they go through the process of applying for the immigrant visa. And then when you're successful, there's another opportunity to then make the final decision of whether to use the visa or not to use it.
One of my colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania was telling me that he honestly thinks that it will be wonderful to try to find the oranges to oranges comparison of people who won the DV, who were selected in the lottery, went through the application process, got the visa, and then decided not to use it, and compare those ones to those who are in the United States who used their visa. Because, he was saying he knew a couple of people who chose not to use their DV visa. And I laughed. I told him, “I don't think I will find many of such people in Nigeria and Ghana.” Because, I think, your family will tell you you're crazy if you win the DV, and you have your immigrant visa, the envelope in your hand, and then at that stage, you decide you're not going to go. I told him, “I will find people who got the immigrant visa, got on the airplane, came to the United States, got their green cards, surveyed the land in the U.S., maybe waited until they became citizens, and then decided to go back because they’re like, ‘This life is not for me.’”
People decide to use the visa because they feel life will be better in the U.S. There are more jobs. In Nigeria and Ghana, a lot of college graduates can't find well-paying jobs. They're hustling. They’re doing a lot of hustling on the side. My uncle once told me that anybody in Nigeria who tells you they are doing business or that they are a businessman is hustling. Basically, meaning that they are not making much money, they are just having to find ways to keep body and soul together.
Some people leave because of critical events. I had one of my respondents, who was doing well in Nigeria, talk about how the experience of having his first child in Nigeria made him apply for the DV. When his wife went into labor and they went to the hospital, the hospital didn't have electrical power because the Nigerian Electrical Power Administration, NEPA—now the NEP PLC—were having blackouts at that time. And then when his wife was in the delivery room, the hospital's generator went off because it had run out of petrol. He said they had to use candles to deliver his baby in the hospital. So, he made up his mind then and there that he needed a change. He described it as his turning point, that he could not stay in Nigeria anymore.
Others moved because the visa is permanent. I had a respondent in my book who was from Ghana. He had gotten admission to go read a bachelor’s degree in Finance in England. But he had a girlfriend in Ghana at that time. His mother told him, “This girl is so good. You can't afford to lose her.” And if he decided to go to England, he would not have been able to bring her along. He had an uncle in England who told him, “Look, come to England. I will support you. I will pay your tuition. Just go to school, get your degree.” But then he won the DV to the United States and based on his mother saying that his girlfriend was really a beautiful girl and don't lose her and knowing he could bring his girlfriend along with him—marry her and bring her along with him to the United States—he decided to give up his admission to university in England and go to America. Which, talking to him about 18 years later, was a point of regret for him, because he hadn't been able to get his college degree. And in a way, he had basically recast his dreams and put them on his daughter—that at least he's doing the best for his daughter, who would be able to live the American dream.
The last thing I would say here is that people also migrate and decide to use the visa because it's a win for their family. It's a family win. They'll be able to help their family with migradollars, and down the line, if the family members want it, apply for them to join them in the United States.
Q. What are diversity visa entrepreneurs? How do they recruit applicants? What services do they offer? How do some diversity visa entrepreneurs exploit applicants?
Who are diversity visa entrepreneurs? Which is what I call them in my book. I would say that diversity visa entrepreneurs serve as a bridge between the DV program and the West African immigrants that the program attracts. Their engagement begins from before the application process, because visa entrepreneurs bring the information about the DV to the doorsteps to hundreds of thousands of individuals who would not otherwise have heard about the program. And then, they offer help to these individuals that feel they need help, who look and say “Okay, this digital photo is so challenging to take.” Because the United States has very precise requirements of the photo that you need to upload with your application, and many people do not understand how to actually meet those requirements. One particular sticky one is that, for many people who take a digital photo with their phone, the photos run from one point something megabytes and above. Some of these photos, it can be up to three megabytes. But the United States says that the size of the digital photo shouldn't be more than 240 kilobytes. So, for many people, it's like, “How do I resize the photo?” And so, they just throw up their hands and they look to these visa entrepreneurs who tell them, “Look, we're offering you a professional service. We will do it professionally. We will take the picture professionally. We will fill your forms. We won't make any errors. We will be your record keeper, so whatever information you put on that form, we will remember that this is what you said. So, if you happen to be chosen, then your documents will align with your initial submission.”
And so, when I was speaking to Ghanaians in Ghana, in Accra, about why they are using these visa entrepreneurs and paying a fee when they ostensibly could have done it themselves for free, they told me, “Look, they're offering us a service.” “They do it professionally.” “They will make sure there are no errors in our application.” “They have a track record of helping people and people winning.” And so that's what the visa entrepreneurs do. They see themselves as facilitating the migration of their citizens; that they are helping their citizens to achieve their dreams of traveling overseas.
Now, in terms of how they recruit applicants, it's varied. I found several types of diversity visa entrepreneurs. I found them in internet cafes. Internet cafes are ubiquitous in a lot of African countries, and they tend to have staff members who are trained to help people apply for the DV. So, an individual will just need to say, “Oh, there's an internet cafe across the street there.” They will walk in, and the staff will say, “What do you want to do?” And they say, “Oh, I want to apply or register for the DV.” And then they will call the staff and lead them off to a computer to get it done. So that's one way, just pure walk ins to internet cafes.
Now, you also have independent contractors. Some of them are affiliated with bigger travel agencies. Others are doing it from their own briefcase and pen and just moving. They go to the schools; they go to the universities. They go to the tertiary institutions across these countries because of the educational requirement of having to be over the age of 18 and having at least the equivalent of a high school diploma. And they go to recruit these individuals. They tell these individuals, “Look, let's register you for the DV.” They incentivize these individuals by telling them, “We'll do it for you for free. You don't have to pay a dime.” And these young men and women are like, “Well, if I don't have to pay, if they just have to fill the form and allow you to take my picture, I will do so.”
Then you also have some mid-sized organizations that are travel agencies. And these were the ones I saw had the financial capacity to have the street tents. They just erect different tents branded with their company name and a chyron advertising how many people they helped register and how many of them won the DV in a particular year. Individuals just walk in and pay the fee, which was equivalent of three to four US dollars, and they help them register for the for the program. So, that's how they recruit.
What services do they offer? I think they will tell you that they offer whatever services the client needs. The simplest service is just helping you register. The internet cafes provide that simple service. “Give us three to four US dollars. We will take your picture. We will upload the picture. We will fill in the information you give us. We will submit your application. I will give you your unique confirmation number, and off you go. And good luck to you.” There are others who basically say, “Look, we will help you register and, peradventure, if you win, we will help you apply for the immigrant visa.” So those individuals will then help the lucky winner apply for a passport if they don't have a passport. They will help them get their transcripts. They will help them get their police reports. They will help them to organize or coordinate their medical visits, all the way to buying them the tickets and putting them on the plane. All of this with a fee, of course. So that’s how involved certain travel agencies are in helping DV winners.
Whether there is exploitation really depends on the business practices of some of these visa entrepreneurs. Many of those visa entrepreneurs are working out of briefcases, who just are sole agents moving about. And I would say that Charles Piot, the anthropologist at Duke University, has written a wonderful book called The Fixer, which is co-authored with the fixer he interviewed, Batema. It describes the practices of those kind of individuals. In the book by Piot, he focuses on marriage brokers. But many of these individuals tell these young applicants, be they in their final year in secondary school or in university that, “Oh, just apply. What do you have to lose? Apply for free. You don't have to pay any money.” The bill becomes due when you win. That's when they will tell you, “Okay for you to be able to go ahead with this process, you need to pay.” So, the individual cannot move forward without them. You have to pay 3,000 to 6,000 U.S. dollars. That's when it becomes a debt burden for these individuals.
Q. What are disrupted undergraduates? What are some of the consequences of winning the diversity visa lottery prior to obtaining a bachelor’s degree?
For me, this was the most saddening and the most consequential of the disruptions that I identified as a direct effect of winning the DV. Whether you are what I call a disrupted undergraduate really depended on the timing of when you won the DV. If you were in your 4th year or 5th year—or 6th year, if you were reading medicine—and you registered in October and you got your notification in May that you won the DV, you are likely to finish your degree program and then be able to migrate to the United States as a college graduate.
However, if you won the DV in your first or second years, or you had just matriculated—you hadn’t even begun classes—the likelihood that you would need to use your visa, if you are successful in the application process, before you had finished your degree was almost 100%. You’re not allowed outside of the United States longer than 180 days as a green card holder. And for many of these individuals, because they are not from wealthy backgrounds, they couldn't afford to go to the United States, return, continue their degree program, then buy another ticket to go back to the United States, and then keep doing that until they graduated, to prevent them from losing the opportunity. And so, they had to make the economic decision to leave or to abandon their degree programs.
Many of these individuals had to borrow from family members to even to be able to afford the visa fees, the processing fees, and the ticket money. And with the pressure of the family, saying, “Look, this is a God sent opportunity. It's going to help the whole family.” These individuals couldn't tell their parents, “Well, I can't go.”
So, what then happens is that these individuals come into the United States without their degrees, and they are treated by the United States as high school diploma holders. And that has a huge impact on them and how they fare in the labor market. The labor market niche, or the ethnic niche for Africans in the labor market, is health care. You find a lot of Africans, either as nurses, if they are the top end, or medical doctors at the top tier, but many are certified nursing assistants, LPNs, home health aides. A lot of caring and carer work. They're working in homes for the disabled, young or old. In the UAE, they call people with disabilities people of determination. So, there are a lot of them working in different homes for people of determination.
And then you have many of these individuals who are trying to take prerequisites in community colleges because they want to go back to school. Many of them want to pursue a nursing degree. And it's difficult. It's challenging because tertiary education in the U.S. is very expensive. So, these individuals are incurring debt. And they are moving at a very slow pace because they can only take one or two courses per semester, if they can even keep taking courses every single semester. Some of them have to take breaks.
I had 23 of those individuals in my sample and I found only two out of the 23 were able to stay back in their home country to finish their degrees before they migrated because their parents were middle class and were able to afford it. One of them had a well-off sibling, who was able to help him buy his tickets, so he was able to finish his degree before he left.
Of the 21 who had to abandon or leave their degree programs, less than half of them had successfully gotten a bachelor’s degree in the United States. And for many it had taken years. It took a woman in my study, Brianna, 12 years or more to get her bachelor's degree. That's the concern.
The last thing I'll say is, that more importantly, there's a psychological trauma for these individuals. For you to have been able to get admission into a university degree program in Nigeria, Ghana, or even other African countries, you have to be very good, because it's very competitive. There are very few spots for a lot of individuals. We know that the majority of the population of most African countries are under the age of 24, so you have to be an excellent student. You have to have great ability to get into university. These individuals who had secured their spots in college were on track to becoming part of the elites in their own countries. I say this because in Nigeria—Nigeria is one of is the most educated West African countries—only 7% of Nigerians in Nigeria have at least a bachelor's degree. This is compared to 62% of the Nigerians in the U.S. So, those individuals were already on track to be middle-class, upper-class elites. And then they now have to leave these degree programs and come struggle to go back to school in the U.S. And they can see their mates, their peers, who they left behind in college, have finished college. Their mates have gone on to do master’s degree. Some have even come to the United States, or gone to England, or Canada, to do master’s or PhDs. And here they are still working as a home health aide or a carer in a home for people of determination and it's a pain. It's a real psychological trauma for these individuals.
Q. How do diversity immigrants view their experiences in the U.S.? What are some of the benefits and challenges of winning the Diversity Immigrant Program lottery?
To understand any of these immigration policies coming out of the Global North—from these advanced countries and even from the in the Middle East, where I am now— you have to have a frame of reference of what the condition is like in their home country. And so, for many of these individuals, even if they are not necessarily doing well or, objectively, they are not middle class, they are doing better than they would in their home countries.
If you are a home health aide, maybe you earn 24,000 to 30,000 USD a year. Maybe you're earning 40,000 USD. But then you do the exchange rate to Naira or cedis, and you're earning in the millions. And so, for these individuals, thinking about it in that way, they're doing better in the United States. They're able to send money to support their families. Many of the diversity immigrants I interviewed are sending money to support parents. They're sending money to help their siblings go to school. They're sending money to help nieces go to university. They're sending money to build homes, do some buying and selling, open a restaurant, a beer parlor, a shop. I've alluded to it many times that winning the DV is a family win. They are really using a lot of their money to keep their families going. And so, for many of these individuals—almost all—when I asked them, they really didn't regret coming to the United States or winning the DV. Again, because they all couched it in that country-by country-comparison, the country comparison of the United States versus Nigeria, the United States versus Ghana.
I found the diversity immigrants I interviewed to be affective Americans; they were very grateful to the United States. Full of thanks and gratitude that the United States had given them this opportunity to come into the country and be permanent legal residents and then potentially citizens, if they decided they wanted to. I think many of us are aware in this era of immigration restriction that is sweeping the land, and sweeping the world, that the DV stands as a commendable program. It’s a program that is unique in that it's not seeking to bar or deter people from coming. It's actively encouraging individuals to come and give their best to the United States, even as the United States benefits from their own labor and their passions and their skills. I think on the whole, just very few had such strong experiences of trauma that they wanted to go back. I know a few who have since returned.
I have a phrase that I use “dreams fulfilled, dreams dashed, or dreams recast.” And I find a lot DV immigrants have recast their dreams. They have basically said, “Well, if we haven't achieved all that we hoped to achieve, at least our children will. We've given our children this opportunity, and our children are doing excellently well.” I would say, that for many of them, they still see this as a win, because of the opportunities their children are able to have. And the fact is that many of their children are doing well, at least in terms of educational attainment.
Another reason why most were happy, or didn't evince regrets, and were affective Americans, is the fact that they have been able to help their families and also sponsor family members who were interested to come join them, as is the right of U.S. permanent residents and citizens.
Q. What changes would you recommend making to improve the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program and the outcomes and experiences of diversity immigrants?
There are two things I would say in response to that question. The first is that the DV program should have a college exemption. If a winner can show proof that they are currently enrolled in a university program—a tertiary degree program—then they should be allowed to go through the application process, and if successful, be given the immigrant visa, and then allowed to defer entry into the United States until they finish their degree program. This is going to be immensely helpful to all the stakeholders.
One thing we keep hearing in the United States, even in the corners that do not like immigration and are trying to restrict the number of immigrants coming in, is that they want more skilled migrants. Well, if you allow these individuals, who have shown that they are so talented, to finish their degree programs, the U.S. will get more skilled migrants and more educated migrants.
For the individuals, they will be able to enter the labor markets at a higher point as college graduates and they will have way more options. They can decide they want to pursue postgraduate studies. They can decide they want to do accelerated nursing programs. It will help their family members because the jobs will be better paid. It means more remittances. It will help the sending countries, because a lot of sending countries are depending on the money being remitted by their citizens in the diaspora. So, this is one huge thing, I think, that can easily be done that will benefit all.
I would say here also that President Trump, then in 2018, really hates this program. He likes to say that the United States is not getting the best, and it boggles his mind that we're not getting the best that people, but it's not true. I would say that we should call the Diversity Visa Immigrant Program by its true name, which is a highly skilled immigrant program. In the in looking at the data, 50% of all diversity immigrants who come into the United States with this program have at least a bachelor's degree. That outpaces the U.S. national average of 39% of the population who have at least a bachelor's degree. And then when you look at Africans, 62% of all the Africans who are coming in through the DV program have at least a bachelor's degree. So, this program, even though it is purportedly lottery, which normally means that it's random and everybody has a chance to win, is not. It's doing a fantastic job of already selecting highly skilled individuals. So, this college exemption will just mean that these percentages of individuals who have at least a bachelor’s will climb even higher.
The second thing I would say is that the experiences of the diversity immigrants in the United States, the West Africans I have looked at—and more generally, actually, using my analysis of the longitudinal data from the New Immigrant Survey—is a cautionary tale. This whole drive to say, “Oh, we want immigrants who are skilled. We want more merit-based migration.” If the United States is pursuing merit-based migration, more skilled migration, without paying any attention to the social networks, the social support that these immigrants are coming in with, or the social support that they will be given once they come in, it's going to be a problem. Because the stories of the diversity immigrants have shown that social support is extremely important in helping immigrants settle and maximize their potential. That's why we're seeing that family reunification immigrants, who are not as highly selected as employer-sponsored or DV immigrants, are doing second best to employer-sponsored immigrants. And refugees, who are fleeing from troubled areas are doing better than diversity immigrants, because of the social support that they are afforded or given when they come to the United States. So, I think we have to think about that in any comprehensive immigration bill. We can't pursue merit-based, more skilled migration without paying any mind to social support. We'll end up not maximizing the potential of these immigrants coming to the United States and actually just experience a lot of brain waste in that population.