Immigration Act of 1990

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The Immigration Act of 1990 (Pub.L. 101-649, 104 Stat. 4978, enacted 1990-11-29) increased the number of legal immigrants allowed into the United States each year. It also created a lottery program that randomly assigned a number of visas. This was to help immigrants from countries where the United States did not often grant visas.

The Act also provided for exceptions to the English testing process required for naturalization set forth by the Naturalization Act of 1906.

After the Act, the United States would admit 700,000 new immigrants annually, up from 500,000 before the bill's passage. The new system continued to favor people with family members already in the United States, but added 50,000 "diversity visas" for countries from which few were emigrating as well as 40,000 permanent job-related visas and 65,000 temporary worker visas. Additional provisions strengthened the U.S. Border Patrol and altered language regarding disease restrictions in a way that permitted the secretary of Health and Human Services to remove AIDS from the list of illnesses making a prospective immigrant ineligible to enter the country.