It's not only chain migration that is now in serious political play, as Alan Wall reported earlier today; the diversity visa lottery is increasingly being yoked to chain migration to make a twofer issue that, I'm guessing, is widely popular and politically plausible.

I covered this twofer aspect in last week's Radio Derb podcast:

This particular reform package — ending chain migration and the diversity visa lottery — is being looked on favorably by all sorts of people right now. If it were a stock, your broker would be urging you to buy.

Here at VDARE.com on Tuesday this week I noted USCIS Director Francis Cissna's December 8th op-ed in The Hill calling for exactly the same thing. USCIS is U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which reports to DHS, so this is not nothing.

It helps — I mean, it helps bring these two issues to the fore, chain migration and the visa lottery — it helps that two recent terror attacks, both in New York, arose from them.

To help even more with the yoking:

The later of the two attacks in fact arose from both of them. This was the suicide bombing on Monday this week at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan.

The bomber, Akayed Ullah, set off a pipe bomb in the busy terminal, hoping to kill himself and many others. Fortunately he failed on both counts, only injuring himself and five other people. He is now in custody.

That same USCIS chap, Director Francis Cissna, told a press briefing on Tuesday that Ullah is, quote: "a green card holder, a lawful permanent resident. He came to this country based on family connection to a U.S. citizen. He was a national of Bangladesh. The U.S. citizen in question was his uncle, and that U.S. citizen, many years ago, came to this country originally as a visa lottery winner."

So the uncle got residence from the visa lottery. He advanced to U.S. citizenship, whereupon he sponsored his sister. She got a settlement visa, bringing with her Mr. Ullah, who is her son, and three or four siblings — no-one seems to know exactly.

That's chain migration: a sister and a handful of nephews and nieces … of a random Bangladeshi, picked by lottery. Make sense to you? No, me neither. [Radio Derb, December 15th; full transcript will be posted on Wednesday.]

The enemy is already preparing a counter-attack.  George Soros's open-borders mouthpiece MediaMatters fired an opening salvo Saturday.

American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA): “Chain migration” is “a pejorative term” used to describe family-based migration. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) defined “chain migration” as a “pejorative term” that carries with it a number of “negative myths” about the family-based immigration system. [Fox and Breitbart are helping Trump mainstream the term “chain migration,” a misleading nativist buzzword by Dina Radtke; MediaMatters, December 13th 2017.]

As Steve would say: If you can't trust the American Immigration Lawyers Association, who can you trust?

The boss gets a mention further down the piece:

Replying to one of Trump’s tweets about “chain migration,” “alt-right” activist Travis Hale wrote, “I remember days when chain migration was a niche topic,” saying that he discussed it with Jared Taylor, publisher of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, and Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist anti-immigration site VDare.com.

I'd mind this kind of agitprop a bit less if they'd put some work into it.  They might, for example, have checked with Ngram Viewer, which shows occurrences of the phrase "chain migration" all the way back in the 1950s, with a huge increase after the 1965 Immigration Act.

George Soros needs to crack that whip more.