Brookings fellow rips Trump: I entered through lottery system

A fellow at the Brookings Institution blasted President Trump’s derision of the visa lottery system on Friday, putting himself forward as an example of the program’s effectiveness.

“I won a green card through the #Diversity lottery & was just called *trash* by @POTUS. Since then Ive completed a PhD at @Harvard, became a fellow at @BrookingsInst & paid LOTS of taxes. I know many others who contribute a lot to this country,” Dany Bahar, an Israeli and Venezuelan economist, wrote on Twitter.

I won a green card through the #Diversity lottery & was just called *trash* by @POTUS. Since then Ive completed a PhD at @Harvard, became a fellow at @BrookingsInst & paid LOTS of taxes. I know many others who contribute a lot to this country. Oh well, perspectives… https://t.co/eTAfOKw0WB

— Dany Bahar (@dany_bahar) December 15, 2017

{mosads}

In a speech to law enforcement officers graduating from the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Va., on Friday, Trump ripped immigrants who enter the U.S. through visa lotteries, calling them the “worst of the worst.”

Trump pointed to two suspects in recent terrorist attacks in New York City as examples of the country’s “dysfunctional immigration system.” 

“You think the country is giving us their best people? No,” Trump said. “What kind of a system is that? They come in by lottery. They give us their worst people, they put them in a bin, but in his hand when he’s picking him are really the worst of the worst.”

Akayed Ullah, 27, who is accused of detonating a pipe bomb in a New York subway passage on Monday, entered the U.S. from his native Bangladesh in 2011 on a visa for relatives of American citizens. 

Sayfullo Saipov, 29, who is accused of driving a truck through a bike path in Manhattan on Halloween, came to the country from Uzbekistan in 2010 after being granted a visa in a lottery for people in countries with historically low immigration to the U.S.

Applicants to the visa lottery program are chosen at random and vetted before they are allowed to enter the U.S.