Diversity Visa lottery a gateway for Social Security fraud, IG says
Article publisher:
Washington Times
Article date:
2 December 2015
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
The Diversity Visa lottery, one of America’s weirder immigration programs, appears to be a gateway for Social Security fraud, according to the findings of an inspector general’s report released last month.
Inspector General Patrick P. O’Carroll Jr. didn’t specifically blame illegal immigrants in the new study, but signaled the numbers issued legally to visa lottery winners could end up in the hands of unauthorized migrants based on previous work.
The findings are fueling calls on Capitol Hill to do away with the Diversity Lottery altogether, and to step up controls on the use of Social Security numbers so the government can lock out numbers whose use is questionable...
Created as a way to ensure immigrants from underrepresented countries have a chance at entering the U.S., the DV, as it’s called, is literally a giveaway, offering 50,000 visas a year to those lucky enough to qualify and have their applications randomly selected.
DV winners are entitled to work permits and Social Security numbers — and some of them were either careless with the numbers, or intentionally gave them away to others, because hundreds of them were used repeatedly with different employers, suggesting fraud was at work...
The DV lottery has been a target for some time for Republicans on Capitol Hill, who question its purpose in the first place, and who said the latest findings show how deeply it is pervaded with fraud...
“No other country in the world hands out the privilege of residency to people based solely on winning a lottery,” Mr. Posey said...
CAIRCO research