Five still-serving Republican senators who voted for the comprehensive immigration bill that created the diversity visa are now reconsidering keeping the visa program in place.

The GOP lawmakers — Thad Cochran of Mississippi, John McCain of Arizona, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Orrin Hatch Utah and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky– were among 89 senators who supported the Immigration Act of 1990. Among other provisions, the bill established the diversity visa lottery system to award immigrant visas to people from countries with historically low levels of immigration to the U.S.

Immigration hawks have for many years criticized the diversity visa lottery as a fraud-prone system that provides little benefit to the national interest. The program has come under especially intense scrutiny in recent days, after officials revealed the terrorist who killed eight people in a truck rampage last week in Manhattan had immigrated to America on a diversity visa.

As calls to reform or terminate the diversity visa intensify — thanks in large part to exhortations from President Donald Trump himself — many GOP lawmakers are promising they will re-visit the law that created the program.

Some of them are immigration hard-liners like GOP Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia, who had already introduced earlier this year a bill that would eliminate the diversity visa. Sensing which way the political winds were blowing, the program’s original Republican supporters have joined in, as well.

McCain, Grassley and Cochran said last week they wanted to see the diversity visa “abolished,” Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson reported on his show on Nov. 2. At that time, McConnell and Hatch had not responded to Carlson’s request for comment on the issue.

McConnell floated the idea over the weekend of putting the diversity visa on the chopping block as a part of a deal replace the now-canceled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

“It could be border security. It could be ending chain migration. It could be the diversity quotas,” McConnell told conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt on his MSNBC program. “But something that tangibly improves the legal immigration system in this country, I think, ought to be attached to DACA.”

When asked for clarification about McConnell’s position on the diversity visa program, a spokesman for the senator’s office directed The Daily Caller News Foundation to the comments he made on Hewitt’s show.

Hatch’s office was likewise non-committal about exactly what the senator envisions for the diversity visa, saying only that he had backed doing away with the program on previous occasions.

“Senator Hatch has supported legislation eliminating the Diversity Visa Lottery in the past, and has championed efforts to reform our broken visa system for a number of years,” Hatch spokesman Matt Whitlock told TheDCNF.

Hatch and several other Republican senators did vote for the so-called “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill of 2013, that would have killed the diversity visa lottery. The bill died in the House when conservatives and immigration hawks objected to its massive amnesty of illegal immigrants and expansion of guest worker visas.

Despite widespread antipathy to the diversity visa among conservative voters, a standalone bill to eliminate the lottery system has not gained traction among Republicans in Congress.

The House Freedom Caucus on Monday endorsed one such bill — the SAFE for America Act — that was introduced by GOP Rep. Bill Posey of Florida earlier this year. In the Senate, however, leading Republican lawmakers are leaning toward McConnell’s suggestion to again tie the diversity visa’s demise to a larger immigration reform bill or DACA amnesty.

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