Luck of the Irish and West Africans: Implementing the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery

This paper examines the implementation of the diversity visa lottery, specifically looking at the agency of non-state actors in crafting the legislation, and at the individuals in West Africa who participated in the lottery, with great success, in the 1990s. The lottery is an annual program that recruits 50,000 “diversity” immigrants from countries who have sent few immigrants to the United States since 1965. Irish constituents and lobbying groups strongly shaped the lottery and ensured its existence in the Immigration Act of 1990. But it is West African emigrants – and local visa services entrepreneurs – who have made the lottery their own and formed a substantial number of diversity visa immigrants in the United States. Drawing on fieldwork in Ghana and archival research, this paper argues that a broad and surprising array of actors have shaped this immigration policy on the ground, around the world, and that the role of non-American actors is essential to understanding how U.S. immigration policy functions.