Is the Green Card Lottery a Stupid Idea???

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Immigration Attorneys in Los Angeles, Lawyer, Attorney Immigration Services, Obtaining a Green Card > Is the Green Card Lottery a Stupid Idea???

As many of our readers know, every year the U.S. State Department has a lottery to give away 50,000 green cards or a sort of random basis.  The idea is that people living in countries that do not have many recent immigrants living in the U.S. are at a disadvantage because they don’t have relatives close enough in relationship (parents, spouses, children and brothers and sisters) that are eligible to file visas on their behalf.  This allows people in African nations or Eastern Europe that traditionally have low recent immigrant populations in the U.S. a chance to immigrate to America.

The annual program makes visas available to persons meeting the simple, but strict, eligibility requirements. A computergenerated, random drawing chooses selectees for Diversity Visas. The visas are distributed among six geographic regions, with a greater number of visas going to regions with lower rates of immigration, and with no visas going to nationals of countries sending more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States over the period of the past five years. No single country may receive more than seven percent of the available Diversity Visas in any one year.

For DV-2013, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply because the countries sent more than 50,000
immigrants to the United States in the previous five years:

BANGLADESH, BRAZIL, CANADA, CHINA (mainland-born), COLOMBIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, ECUADOR, EL
SALVADOR, GUATEMALA, HAITI, INDIA, JAMAICA, MEXICO, PAKISTAN, PERU, PHILIPPINES, SOUTH KOREA,
UNITED KINGDOM (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and VIETNAM.
A native ordinarily means someone born within a particular country, regardless of the individual’s current country of
residence or nationality. Persons born in Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, and Taiwan are eligible.

The law was proposed by the late Senator Edward Kennedy so as to help the many “illegal” Irish aliens living in Boston in the 1980′s.

Originally, the applicants had to time the filing of their applications to arrive on the first day of the lottery since the first 100,000 or so received would be the “winners”.  More people “win” that there are visa numbers because they ultimately do not qualify to be immigrants of the U.S. due to various reasons including lack of high school diploma or skilled job offer, criminal record or illegally living in the U.S. for over 180 days.  This is still the case.

I think the “Green Card Lottery” is a crazy idea… but I like it.  Sure, those quota numbers could otherwise be given to the relative categories so families could be reunited sooner.  Or the employment based categories so U.S. employers and skilled and professional foreign worker would not have to wait so many years for their applications to be processed due to the ever growing quota number backlogs.

However, if the “Green Card Lottery” was eliminated by Congress, as many anti-immigrant advocates argue, the truth is that the numbers would not be transferred to the other quotas – just eliminated making the total number of legal immigrants to U.S. each year smaller.  And who knows, maybe one of those Polish, Ukranian, or African immigrants might someday have a kid who becomes President of the United States.