Bangladesh: A Case Study in Chain Migration
By Jessica Vaughan and Preston Huennekens on January 11, 2018
Jessica Vaughan is the director of policy studies and Preston Huennekens is a research assistant at the Center for Immigration Studies.
On December 11, 2017, Akayed Ullah strapped a homemade pipe bomb to his chest and entered the New York subway system. According to news outlets, Ullah is a 27-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh who came to the United States legally through chain migration. Specifically, he arrived after his aunt or uncle won the visa lottery and then, in turn, sponsored his mother for an immigrant visa. She was able to bring him along as her "child", even though he was 20 years old at the time.1 The family, numbering five or six people, arrived in 2011.
The recent history of immigration from Bangladesh is a good case study for how the visa lottery program, in combination with chain migration, has created a large new pipeline of immigration from certain countries whose citizens are heavy users of the visa lottery.
https://cis.org/Report/Bangladesh-Case-Study-Chain-Migration
