So now we learn that the New York truck terrorist came here from Uzbekistan on a “diversity visa” in 2010. Have you ever heard of this program before? I hadn’t, but it’s also known as the “green card lottery,” and that sounds at least somewhat familiar.

You or I may not have heard of the program prior to its gaining notoriety from this terrorist’s actions, but there are some Republicans who’ve been trying to end it for some time:

Trump, though, along with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), has been calling for an end to the Diversity Visa Lottery program since August. Under the RAISE Act, introduced in February and endorsed by Trump in August, the Diversity Visa Lottery would be eliminated altogether.

The Trump administration took eliminating the Diversity Visa Lottery even more seriously earlier this month when they introduced the president’s immigration priorities, which like the RAISE Act called for the elimination of the program.

In an interview with Breitbart News, Cotton said the Diversity Visa Lottery does not serve the national interest, as it arbitrarily rewards random foreign nationals with visas to come to the U.S.

“The diversity lottery serves no discernible humanitarian or economic interest,” Cotton explained to Breitbart News.

A man whose writing I’ve come to rely on more and more these days for all things legal—Andrew C. Carthy—has been critical of the diversity visa policy for a decade. Today he writes a must-read column on the subject; I strongly suggest you read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

I wrote about the Diversity Visa Program in The Grand Jihad, my book about the sharia supremacist strategy for infiltrating and “destroying the West” (to quote the Muslim Brotherhood). As detailed there: “Since the Bush 41 administration, the State Department has also been running a “Diversity Visa” program, the very purpose of which is to promote immigration from countries whose citizens resist coming to the United States ”” i.e., to encourage our cultural disintegration. It is a hare-brained scheme, concocted by hard-Left Senator Ted Kennedy, because the Irish (yes, the Irish!) were purportedly underrepresented in our gorgeous mosaic. Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, describes the consequences: Fully one-third of the annual diversity-visa lottery winners now come from Islamic countries, which means that the program has become a disproportionately important immigration vehicle for Muslims.”…

As night follows day, we learn that, in the years leading up to yesterday’s attack, Saipov gravitated to the Omar Mosque in Paterson, N.J. Sharia supremacism’s inroads have made the community the object of counterterrorism investigations for over a dozen years. Because of the centrality of immigration issues to the Trump campaign and presidency, we have been debating visa and refugee policy. I’ve thus tried to point out, any number of times: While the potential that trained jihadists could enter the country by masquerading as good-faith immigrants is serious, it is not the primary danger. The overarching threat is self-created: an immigration policy that promotes assimilation-resistant enclaves in which sharia supremacism embeds…

…[a]s we’ve been contending here for months, the ill-considered, ineffectual “travel bans” have pushed the Trump administration into a posture that makes screening for sharia supremacism much more difficult…

I revisited this problem after the Supreme Court allowed these travel restrictions to go into effect last summer: “As I have been arguing, the executive orders in question have been a disaster because they provide no meaningful improvement in security, yet the litigation over them has done serious damage to the overarching goal of an improved vetting system. In order to defend the president from the claims of anti-Muslim bias, the administration has argued that the travel-ban orders have nothing to do with Islam. Thus, the administration has been lured into supporting, at least tacitly, the proposition that restrictions on alien admissions would be constitutionally invalid if they took Islam into account. Yet, without taking Islam into account ”” i.e., without sorting anti-American sharia supremacists from pro-American Muslims supportive of the Constitution ”” there is no way to restrict the entry of Muslims who would increase the threat of jihadism and undermine our society.”

When Trump was a candidate and first proposed his Muslim travel ban it created a storm of disapproval. Nearly two years ago, when that happened, I suggested that ideological vetting was the way to go (and I quoted Andrew C. McCarthy at length on the subject). I haven’t changed my mind.

“Diversity” is one of those words that has come to be considered by the left to be good in and of itself, and it’s been drummed into us that if we’re against it we’re racists. Well, I’m all for racial and ethnic diversity, but I draw the line at ideological diversity in which people who espouse belief systems antithetical to the ideals and traditions and laws of America are let into this country. Such people can come in all shapes and sizes, but Islamic jihadism is one of the most dangerous of the ideologies and only Muslims espouse it.

There are plenty of Muslims who are just fine (I’ve written about that many times before, for example here, so if you disagree with me go read my posts on it). But there are some who are not, and we need to figure out who they might be. What’s more, in the meantime, programs that encourage more and more Muslims to come from countries where terrorism has a significant presence are programs that need to be suspended or substantially changed. And above all, the vetting process needs to be designed to explicitly weed out those who might want to destroy this country—and that includes all such ideologies of that sort, not just jihadism. If we are unsure how to do that, we need to err on the side of caution until we figure it out.

And yes, people can also be radicalized after moving here. That’s another knotty problem. But it’s true of the millions of people already here, and it’s of jihadism even true for converts to Islam. So later ideological radicalization will remain a risk. But the way to deal with that—and one I strongly advocate—is the approach McCarthy alludes to when he writes [emphasis mine]: “The overarching threat is self-created: an immigration policy that promotes assimilation-resistant enclaves in which sharia supremacism embeds.” There are mosques that are known to be recruitment and propaganda centers for jihadism, and something more needs to be done to infiltrate and crack down on this phenomenon.

But for starters, it’s time to end the diversity visa system, an outdated policy that has too much risk built into it—and that was the case even before this attack. Let’s see whether Congress manages to tackle this one, because it was an act of Congress that created it.