Extreme right blames Schumer for Manhattan terror attack
The extreme right has found its true culprit in Tuesday's deadly terrorist attack in Manhattan: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
As details emerged about the incident, prominent right-wing commentators and news outlets seized on an ABC News story reporting that alleged attacker Sayfullo Saipov had come to the United States from Uzbekistan under a State Department program known as the Diversity Visa Lottery. That story is unconfirmed.
Schumer, they claimed, was the brains behind it program and therefore bears responsibility for the attack. In a flurry of news interviews, blog posts and late night tweets, critics tried to pin blame on the New York Democrat, saying he alone was "responsible" for allowing the 29-year-old suspect's entry into the country.
The diversity visa program has been around for more than 20 years. It offers a limited number of visas to people from parts of the world that have relatively few immigrants in the United States.
Schumer did play a key role in drawing up the program in 1990. His proposals eventually became part of a broader immigration package that was passed by Congress it in a bipartisan vote and signed into law by a Republican president.
For Sebastian Gorka, a former aide to President Donald Trump known for his anti-immigration views, that was enough string to connect the minority leader to Saipov, who is accused of plowing a truck into people on a bike path, killing eight.
"He 'won' his visa under the Diversity Lottery program introduced by none other than @SenSchumer," Gorka tweeted Tuesday.
Speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox News, conservative radio host Mark Levin gave a similar assessment.
"You know who the sponsor was? Chuck Schumer," he said, to which Hannity responded, "Good grief."
"This diversity visa program should be gutted," Levin said. "The purpose of immigration, historically, is to improve the United States, is to benefit the United States, not to ensure diversity from the foreigners coming into this country, not to ensure that certain countries are well represented."
Breitbart News wrote that Schumer had "created" the program and referred to the visas as "Schumer visas."
By early Wednesday morning, "Diversity Visa" was trending on Twitter, appearing in more than 53,000 tweets. Some users shared graphic illustrations of Schumer with blood dripping from hands. "You have blood on your hands Chuck," one tweet read.
Congress approved the Diversity Visa Lottery, also known as the green card lottery, as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, but it didn't take effect until 1995.
Under the program, the State Department offers 50,000 visas to each year to immigrants from parts of the world with relatively low immigration rates over the previous five years. Currently, most go to people from African nations, as The Post has reported.
To qualify, applicants must have a high school education or two years in an occupation in that requires formal training. Those who meet eligibility requirements are selected at random from a computer lottery. The State Department refers to them as "diversity immigrants."
The program did originate in part in a bill introduced in 1990 by Schumer, who was then a member of the House. He proposed making a set numbers of visas available each year to "diversity immigrants" from "low-admission" countries.
Schumer's measure was absorbed into a broader House immigration bill, which was sponsored by Schumer and 31 others, including seven Republicans. The legislation passed in a bipartisan vote of 231-192. The Senate version, which contained the "diversity immigrants" provision, passed in an overwhelming 89-8 vote and was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush at the end of 1990.
For the past decade or so, political leaders have debated whether to keep issuing diversity visas.
A Congressional Research Service report from 2011 noted that some lawmakers and government officials had raised concerns about the diversity visa program, suggesting that there were national security reasons to eliminate it. The report mentioned one case in which an Egyptian immigrant whose spouse was a diversity immigrant shot and killed two people at Los Angeles International Airport. It also cited debate over the reliability of background checks in countries that qualified at the time for the diversity lottery.
The Government Accountability Office reviewed the program in 2007 and found no documented evidence that diversity immigrants posed a terrorist threat, but concluded that the program was vulnerable to fraud. The State Department under President George W. Bush rejected the agency's recommendations, contending that its fraud screening program was robust.
Trump said earlier this year that he supported legislation to eliminate diversity visas. The Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act in the Senate would scrap the program entirely.
The Uzbek immigrant community in the United States is small, numbering in the tens of thousands, making Uzbekistan a prime candidate for the diversity visa program. By comparison, there were about 2.4 million Indian immigrants, 2.7 million Chinese immigrants and more than 11 million Mexican immigrants living in the United States as of 2015, according to figures from the Migration Policy Institute. The U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan advertises diversity visas on its website.