Last week I was in Chicago for a few days. It was wonderful
to visit an old friend of my parents, I also met one of her sons, as well as
the son of another of my parents’ friends, went to a delightful jam session in
a jazz club and ate an amazing steak. When distances were too long to walk, I
used Uber in order to get from place to place in that beautiful city.
Conversations with drivers are a well-known means of
informing one-self about a country/city/political situation etc. And thus, I
had some interesting conversations with my drivers. Invariably they were immigrants
and when it came to the question how they had managed to come to the US, the
response was often that they had applied for a visa in the Green Card Lottery
and won. I recall having had the same experience on previous visits to the USA.
The Green Card Lottery, the real name of which is “Diversity
Immigrant Visa Program”, makes available 50,000 visas annually. Do they all
become Uber drivers? Or is that a now established “get off my back and don’t
ask me whether I am legal” response?
