DIVERSITY VISA LOTTERY
ASSISTED REGISTRATION SERVICES

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The congressionally mandated Immigrant Diversity Visa Lottery Program is administered on an annual basis by the United States Department of State and conducted under the terms of Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Section 131 of the Immigration Act of 1990 (Pub. L. 101-649) amended INA 203 to provide for a new class of immigrants known as "diversity immigrants" (DV immigrants). The Act makes available 50,000 permanent resident visas annually through the Diversity Visa Lottery (DV Lottery) to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.

The annual DV Lottery program, officially called the Diversity Visa Lottery or more commonly the Green Card Lottery, makes permanent residence visas available to persons meeting the simple, but strict, eligibility requirements. Green Card Lottery applicants for Diversity Visas are chosen by a computer-generated random lottery drawing. The diversity visas, however, 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 citizens of countries sending more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. in the past five years. Within each region, no one country may receive more than seven percent (7%) of the available Diversity Visas in any one year.