WASHINGTON, D.C. — The visa lottery has triggered a hidden wave of chain migration, and has delivered almost 5 million foreign nationals to the United States since 1994, says a new analysis.

New research by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals the enormous chain-migration impact of the visa lottery program, where 50,000 visas every year are given to foreign nationals from a multitude of countries. The countries include those with terrorist problems, including Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Yemen, and Uzbekistan.

Foreign nationals from eligible countries can win the visa lottery if they have a high-school degree and two years of work experience. Once they win the green cards to permanently stay in the United States, the migrants can bring in their spouses and minor children. Each arrival can get citizenship in five years, and then begin choosing members of their extended family — including parents, siblings and their children — to also become U.S. residents and citizens, regardless of their character, education, ideology or security risks. This expanding, unscreened immigration system is known as “chain migration,” and it has more than doubled U.S. immigration rates during since the 1980s.

The program is in the public eye because of the November 1 massacre of eight cyclists in New York, allegedly by Uzbek Muslim — Sayfullo Saipov — who won a green card in the 2010 visa lottery.

Data collected by the Center for Immigration Studies found that 1.1 million lottery winners have brought 3.8 million unscreened chain-migrants to the United States since 1994.

Preston Huennekens from the Center for Immigration Studies explains in his report:

Despite its supporters’ assurances that the Visa Lottery is responsible for only 50,000 immigrants in any given year, chain migration means that the program actually accounts for perhaps 165,000 new immigrants per year because of earlier lottery winners sponsoring their relatives. In addition, the multiplier for Visa Lottery immigrants could be even larger than other green card categories because the per-country caps and long waiting lists that slow down immigration from the main sending countries like Mexico and the Philippines would not apply to applicants from lottery source countries, since they are by definition getting fewer green cards overall. This is far more than the advertised 50,000 people per year, and its implications certainly warrant discussion in the broader debate of the Visa Lottery’s future. Foreign nationals in the United States each bring approximately 3.45 extended family members into the country. Every year, close to 200,000 chain migrants are brought in by prior-year lottery winners, adding to the huge legal and illegal immigrant population that now stands at a record 44 million.