Green Card Lottery

A group of immigrants from more than 20 countries recently filed a class-action lawsuit against the US State Department for mishandling the 2012 green card lottery.The suit involves the State Department’s recent slip-up in which it mistakenly notified more than 20,000 foreigners that they won green cards but subsequently voided them, claiming that the results were invalid due to a computer glitch.  According to the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, a new diversity drawing will take place in the next few weeks.
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, or green card lottery, provides up to 55,000 diversity visas annually from a pool of entrants through a random selection process.  All entries must be nationals of countries with low rates of immigration to the US. The State Department does not notify successful applicants by email. Rather, entrants are encouraged to check the status of their entries through a website posting.In the past, the diversity visa program has been obstructed by scammers posing as the US government and “notifying” applicants via fraudulent emails and letters in an attempt to extract fees from applicants. But the most recent debacle was a result of posting incorrect results on the website.To ensure that all available visa slots are filled for each fiscal year, more winners are selected in the lottery than there are visas available. This means that winners must be selected and processed before all diversity green cards are distributed.
The Lottery’s Application Process

Lottery applicants must apply during a 30-day registration period, which usually runs from October through December of each year. Applicants who are selected are given instructions to demonstrate eligibility for the visa.

Once they have been selected in the lottery, successful applicants must complete the immigrant visa application on Form I-485, pay required fees, complete a medical examination and be interviewed by a consular officer at the US embassy to demonstrate eligibility.  In order to qualify for the visa, the applicant must have at least a high school education or two years of work experience in an occupation requiring at least two years of training or experience.The visas are distributed among six geographic regions, with a greater number of visas going to regions with historically lower rates of immigration. Applicants from certain countries with high historical immigration rates to the US, such as nationals of China and India, are ineligible to apply for a diversity visa.
There will hopefully be some positives resulting from the unfortunate computer glitch that dashed the hopes of 20,000 applicants. Perhaps some of these applicants will be find out that they have (once again) been selected. For those who will not continue on, the green card lottery process begins anew.
Winning, and losing, the green card lottery.
Of the 15 million people around the world who entered their names in the U.S. green card lottery this year, Tarik Ansari was one of the lucky minority, fewer than 1 percent, who made it to the final stage.The 24-year-old French computer engineer was in his San Francisco apartment May 1 when the State Department announced the results of its annual giveaway of 50,000 diversity visas, awarded to people from countries with relatively low levels of immigration to the United States. The notice informed Ansari that he was randomly selected to apply for one of the coveted slots. He could barely contain his excitement."Someone pinch me so I know it's not a dream?" he wrote on his Twitter account moments later.The pinch -- more like a punch -- came almost two weeks later when the U.S. government told Ansari and about 22,000 others that it made a mistake. A computer glitch warped the selection process into something less random than required, apparently favoring those who applied on certain dates. The State Department voided the lottery results and promised a redraw in the summer.
Thousands were devastated by the turnaround. As the State Department prepares to announce the results of its redraw Friday, some of those angered by the bungled lottery have sued to demand that the government reconsider its original results. A hearing on their class-action case began Tuesday in a federal court in Washington, D.C. After an hours-long hearing, Judge Amy Jackson asked for more technical information from the State Department and continued the case to Wednesday. Ansari, though not a plaintiff, took a red-eye flight to witness the hearing.Dublin resident Anton Kuraev, 28, is one of the 36 plaintiffs suing over the botched lottery. The Russian software engineer moved to the Bay Area on a temporary work visa four years ago, but getting permanent residency -- a green card -- has been difficult, he said. This year was his third applying for the diversity visa.The chances of being randomly selected for the diversity visa are slim, so Kuraev was overjoyed to find out that he was picked to apply. The notice did not guarantee a visa, but it did mean he beat millions of other entrants to reach the final stage. He spent hundreds of dollars to file the necessary paperwork.Unlike most of the lottery entrants, applicants such as Kuraev and Ansari already live in the U.S., but their stay here is temporary. They may have to return home if they cannot obtain green cards"I will be OK with any (court) decision," Kuraev said in an email. "If there was really a problem with that software and it violated the law and there were no other ways to fix it -- except voiding the selection -- so be it. What I don't understand, however, is why nobody is disciplined for all that mess."Some lawmakers are pointing to the lottery glitch as a reason to abolish the program entirely, arguing that it does not make sense to give people green cards purely on the luck of the draw."You don't even have to have a compelling reason. You just want to come," said Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Simi Valley, who chairs the immigration subcommittee in the House of Representatives. "You put your names in a hat, and the names come."Gallegly this week is marking up a Virginia Republican's bill that would eliminate diversity visas.

The diversity visa lottery is one of the few methods for people without existing connections in the United States to settle here. The visa is for those from countries that have not already sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. in the last five years. That leaves most European and African countries eligible, but it disqualifies anyone from Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and 15 other nations
The top countries for diversity visa applicants include Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Receiving so many green card applicants from those countries is not a priority for Gallegly, who said the U.S. already welcomes far too many immigrants annually .This lottery thing is -- they're saying it's for the purpose of ethnic diversity," he said. "But clearly we are one of the most diverse countries on the face of the earth."Gallegly said the lottery is also ripe for abuse by terrorists and foreign spies. He pointed to a 2002 fatal shooting at Los Angeles International Airport committed by an Egyptian man who was able to migrate to the U.S. because his wife won a diversity visa several years earlier.