Immigration E-Zine

Entering the Diversity Visa Lottery

Each year, Congress makes 55,000 visas available to citizens of countries with historically low immigration rates to the US. Known as the diversity visa lottery, those whose names are selected are eligible to receive legal permanent residence in the United States.

There are only two eligibility requirements for the lottery:

• Applicants must be a native from a country that has sent less than 50,000 immigrants to the US in the past five years. The US State Department Office of Consular Affairs provides a list of eligible and ineligible countries. To be considered a native, an applicant must have been born in an eligible country, be married to a spouse born in an eligible country, or have parents whom were born in an eligible country. To use a parent's native country, the parent must have been born in the country and lived in that country at the time of the applicant's birth.
• Applicants must possess requisite education or work experience. For educational purposes, applicants must have a high school education or equivalent. If they do not, they must have two years of work experience within the past five years in an occupation that requires at least two years of training or experience. The US Department of Labor has a database that lists the types of qualifying work experiences, known as O*Net OnLine. This database can be accessed online from the Department of Labor's Web site.

The application process is handled electronically. After the submission deadline has passed, a computer program randomly selects the winners of the lottery. The world is divided up into six geographic regions, with a set number of diversity visas going to each of the regions. Under current guidelines, no one country in any region may receive more than 7% of the available visas.

Applicants may only submit one application. If duplicate applications are discovered for any one person, that person will be disqualified from the lottery. If an applicant is selected, his or her spouse and unmarried children under 21 may apply for visas to join the diversity visa lottery winner in the US. It is important for applicants to list all of their children on their diversity visa lottery application. If an applicant does not list a child on the application, and then wins a visa and wants to bring this child to the United States, they will be unable to do so unless the child was born after the applicant was notified of his or her selection.

Those selected as winners are notified via mail that they have been selected and are provided a limited amount of time to apply for their visas. If the time period lapses and the winner has not applied for the visa, the applicant will have to submit a new application in the diversity lottery during the next submissions period.

Winners of the diversity lottery are not guaranteed admittance to the US. They still must apply and be approved for visas, which includes an in-person interview with a US consular officer. During this interview, the winning applicant will have to present evidence of his or her requisite education and/or work experience.

Thousands of people apply for diversity lottery visas each year. It is important that applicants follow all of the requirements of the application and provide truthful information in order to preserve their chance to win a visa.

Getting Ready To Apply for a Visa

To read and print out a copy of the checklist, please follow the link below.

Getting Ready to Apply for a Visa

You can download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader here.

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