What Immigration and Gambling Have in Common and What It Has to Do with All of Us?

Hope. Both social phenomena originate at the same place in our hearts and minds, in “an optimistic attitude based on an expectation of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one’s life”. While gambling and immigration take different roads to get to the final point, they represent the dream act we’re ready to relentlessly pursue in our lives — one of a promised land.

As such, notwithstanding differences, they are based on similar principles and share a few parallels.

Immigrants from all over the world bet all they have, including their lives, in the gamble with the ICE officers and the United States immigration laws. To be successful, they need not only luck and skills but, more importantly, have to be ready to adopt the culture, social values and norms, mindset, work ethics, laws, and customs of the society they strive to become part of.

Immigrants can gamble legally or illegally. If the intent is approached in a proper way, they might be welcomed as new members of their respected communities. Interestingly enough, odds exponentially grow when they pursue their resolve legitimately just as they decrease significantly when they exercise it in an unlawful manner.

Even when immigrants do everything by the book, as they should, luck will play its part.

One could have a master’s degree, super-high IQ, a skill set needed and mindset greeted in the United States, and yet be sent back home. Just as one could have none of it and successfully remain, for someone was ready to lucratively provide for H4 EAD visa or such.

Gamblers, on the other hand, often don’t bet all they have but do play on a steady and growing pace. Particularly in America where patrons enjoy in 25.6% of all global gross wins in 2018, with projected CAGR of 10.8% in the next five years, according to H2 Gambling Capital. Offline or online, they just use different gaming options to manage their optimistic expectations of positive outcomes.

To be successful, players need comprehensive skills and knowledge of gambling strategies and tactics, games rules, pay tables, odds, betting systems, statistics, calculations, and other relevant information. In addition, they have to govern themselves responsibly at all times through awareness, stability, patience, and perseverance in a revolving contest of luck, choices, and balances.

Gamblers can play legally or illegally. Curiously enough, their chances are somehow always increased when they practice games in legalized and well-regulated environments, just as they tend to became suddenly murky when pursued in underground establishments. Particularly when it comes to fair play and payments of their wins.

And yet again, even when everything is hunky dory, the luck will have the final say.

You could have two queens dealt as hole cards, the other guy having ace and king, then be dealt with a queen and double sevens in the flop, and still, lose when the turn and the river produce two kings, ultimately giving your opponent better full house. (Real-life story from Texas hold’em game. The dealer burns two cards in the process. The probability of two kings to be dealt in community cards range between 0.110% and 0.332% — former in case of the fourth king being among burn cards, the later in case it isn’t.)

Out of Many, One.

The moral of immigration and gambling comparison, notwithstanding luck, is simple.

There is the right and wrong way of doing things, the right and wrong way of conducting ourselves regardless of potential gains. It’s just the way life is, even when it isn’t. Likewise, there is a legal and illegal way to conduct our affairs.

Which one do you think is wrong?

(At this point we usually inhale to rapidly point out to numerous illicit and highly profitable wrongfulness of zeitgeist we share, and we would probably be right. But, we could just for a moment listen to our inner voice, no matter how short-lived or long-lasting it may be. That is our integrity talking, the deeply rooted sense of righteousness we all have. Right is always right, wrong is for no one, even when others do it.)

Consequently, the only way to immigrate and gamble in the United States is a legal one.

Everything else is just tunnel trying to suspend one wall or the other. Such digging is always a dark, inhospitable place loaded with rats that so effectively toppled even the integrity of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984.

Of course, to do things legally and rightfully is not always comfortable.

To somehow elevate this situation, immigration and gambling meet together every year. Since 1986, they convene in the country with an unofficial motto E Pluribus Unum, imprinted in the Great Seal, national currency, and buildings across the nation, translated in the subhead of this chapter.

Each group is well represented.

With the majority of the world’s population invited, approximately twenty million people show up as potential participants to take their chances with 0.25% probability of a win.

Awaiting them is the realm fittingly reflecting motto of the organizer, a game that contributed much in the buildup of colonial America, and a national pastime with $28.9 billion turnover in 2018, amounting for 25% of total gambling market in America, according to H2 Gambling Capital.

The United States Green Card Lottery.

Established by the Immigration Act of 1990, administered by the Department of State, and conducted under quotas of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, this game of chance — also one of the oldest in the world, believed to have helped finance the Great Wall of China, a country of its origin — will award 50,000 people with an opportunity of new life in the greatest country in the world.

The decisive, ultimate factor to win? Good old fashion blind luck. And yet again, people do it over and over again. Why?

Because, at its core, the meeting has little to do with a permanent resident card or immigration and gambling but with...

…the hope that we will be chosen and rewarded in the risk we take.

Did Pandora Gamble and Won?

The Green Card Lottery is just the agglomeration of different hopes we’re able to generate and manifest. In various walks of life, in a number of personal and professional endeavors, in a myriad of our daily activities, all of us hope.

We trust our “cognitive skill that demonstrates an individual’s ability to maintain drive in the pursuit of a particular goal,” as American psychologist Charles R. Snyder defined it in his book The Psychology of Hope.

(Regarding another potential inhale preceding the outburst of possible renunciations — when we say that we don’t hope, what we actually do is consciously not allowing our mind to think of positive outcome; we don’t want to jinx it; we think it’s better to not expect a thing and not be let down when nothing happens than to expect something and be disappointed when it doesn’t happen. While Stoics thrive in this peculiar setup, they hope too, just for a different thing.)

But why is hope so special in the first place?

Because we cannot turn it off.

Just as we cannot stop to gamble or migrate from place to place — if Homo sapiens didn’t indulge in both and moved from Africa, hoping for something, who knows where we would be today.

Hope has been with us ever since. As we can see from an essay by Claudia Bloeser and Titus Stahl at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it has been on top of our thoughts too.

If it’s up to Greek mythology, the Elpis has been introduced to us by Zeus. Infuriated by Prometheus who stole fire from him and gave it to humans, Zeus created a box that contained all manners of evil unbeknownst to the receiver.

Pandora opened it out of curiosity, despite the warning not to do so, and unleashed a multitude of harmful spirits that inflicted plagues and diseases on mankind. Greed, envy, hate, mistrust, sorrow, anger, lust, revenge, and despair scattered far and wide looking for humans to torment.

Inside the box, however, Pandora also discovered the healing spirit named Hope. From ancient times, people have recognized its helping powers in times of great difficulties and suffering.

Aristotle believed “hope underlies deliberation”. Augustine of Hippo writes “the hope for a future life underlies all true human happiness”. Tomas Aquinas argues that “the objects of hope [are] unlikely outcomes or outcomes that are hard to achieve but which are nonetheless in the realm of possibility”.

Immanuel Kant claims that a “particular hope (or intention formed on the basis of hope) is not irrational as long as its object cannot be proven to be impossible”.

Kierkegaard additionally makes a distinction between temporal (earthly) and eternal (heavenly) hope. He writes about the hope we have when we’re young, type of embedded confidence, which is “followed by hope involving the reflection about the probability of the hoped-for outcome”. Defining this hope as temporal, he recognizes the possibility of disappointment caused by “the lateness or non-arrival of the expected goods”.

Distress is, however, “necessary in order to acquire eternal hope [which] cannot in principle be disappointed” because “temporal hope is judged by the understanding according to its probability, [while] eternal hope exceeds the limits of understanding.” As such, eternal hope can be either deemed as irrational or identified with religious understandings, Kierkegaard concludes.

The Promised Land

This quick rundown on hope would not be complete without mentioning Hope, “the girl of your dreams. She’s the smartest, kindest, funniest, most intelligent, and beautiful girl you’ll ever come to meet”. Back in 2016, Urban Dictionary opinion on the subject also noted that Hopes are always hot (true).

Whichever angle of approach we choose when we consider hope (or Hope), a rational and emotional connection between our expectations and the outcome is omnipresent and inextinguishable.

What makes the setup unique is that our reliance on hope tends to grow proportionally with the risks we undertake, particularly as probabilities decrease and possibilities increase.

For some, taking risks involves buying the used car or an old house, using secondhand wardrobe or taking a stray cat from the street. For others, it involves buying a new prom dress expecting him to be mesmerized or coming first in the race looking for her hug at the finish line. There are people that face it as they board planes or vessels to their vacation destinations while others experience it as they run over crosswalks with the stop light turned on, or as they climb up the corporate ladder.

Regardless of their walks of life, they all hope.

For gamblers, taking risks involves aspirations for the best possible outcome as they put their expectations, temporarily transformed into chips, on the green baize of any table game or insert them in slot machines, or look for tale-tell signs of their counterparts across the poker table, or observe their screens assessing digital luck. Players balance their opportunities depending on intentions: the majority look for fun while others practice it professionally.

Irrespective to their motives, all of them hope.

And then, there are ones that end up among two million of the U.S. adults classified as compulsive gamblers, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling.

Meeting their other, darker side as they play and nurture temporal hope on a way in, despite warnings not to do so, they are yet to take the ultimate gamble on the way back. Supported by professionals and gambling industry standards for responsible operations, these people chip in their determination and inner strength in the belief they have what it takes to win themselves again.

This time, though, cultivating eternal hope.

For, we can lose or win anything — opportunity, luck, money, income and savings, jobs, girlfriends, boyfriends, houses, cars, land, culture, country, people, laws, health, honor, dignity, even ourselves and Nature itself — but we will never be without hope.

However…

…to make hope meaningful we must regulate it responsibly.

Hope is not a guarantee. It is just a sensation we feel. Unless managed in a balanced manner it is of no use. If not underlined by knowledge and skills it’s irrelevant. Left without rational counterpart of our personalities, it can be destructive. Without control, it can lead to insanity.

That is the final thing gambling and immigration, expressions of hope, have in common: both need to be embraced in a regulated and legalized manner, practiced responsibly, and done right.

Because…

As long there is life there will be risks, for life is a risk. As long there is a risk there will be hope, fueling us to rationally take them. As long as there is hope there will be life, defined and balanced by our luck and skills, probabilities and possibilities, chances and choices.

Gambling is just one of the vehicles we use on that journey.