Immigration: Diversity Visa Lottery
Released: 2004-04-26T00:00:00

RS21342 -- Immigration: Diversity Visa Lottery

Updated April 26, 2004

Background

The purpose of the diversity visa lottery is, as the name suggests, to encourage legal immigration from countries other than the majorsending countries of current immigration to the United States. The law weighs allocation of immigrant visas heavilytowards alienswith close family in the United States and, to a lesser extent, aliens who meet particular employment needs. Thediversity immigrantcategory was added to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by the Immigration Act of 1990 ( P.L. 101-649 )to stimulate "newseed" immigration (i.e., to foster new, more varied, migration from other parts of the world). (1) The current diversity lottery began inFY1995 following three transitional years with temporary lotteries. (2)

The diversity lottery makes 55,000 visas available annually to natives of countries from which immigrantadmissions were lower thana total of 50,000 over the preceding five years. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Bureau(USCIS) generatesthe formula for allocating visas according to the statutory specifications: visas are divided among six geographicregions according tothe relative populations of the regions, with their allocation weighted in favor of countries in regions that wereunder-representedamong immigrant admissions to the United States. The Act limits each country to 7%, or 3,850, of the visa limit,and provides thatNorthern Ireland be treated as a separate foreign state. Recipients of the visas become legal permanent residents(LPRs) of the UnitedStates.

While the diversity lottery has not been directly amended since its enactment in 1990, the Nicaraguan Adjustment and CentralAmerican Relief Act of 1997 (NACARA) temporarily reduces the 55,000 annual ceiling by up to 5,000 visasannually. Beginning inFY1999, the diversity ceiling became 50,000 to offset immigrant visa numbers made available to certainunsuccessful asylum seekersfrom El Salvador, Guatemala, and formerly communist countries in Europe who are being granted LPR status underspecial rulesestablished by NACARA. While the offset is temporary, it is not clear how many years it will be in effect to handlethese adjustmentsof status.

Trends in Admission

In FY2002, there were 42,829 persons actually admitted or adjusted as LPRs with diversity visas, according to the FY2002 USCISadmissions data. This number represents 4% of all LPRs in FY2002 and is comparable to FY2001, when 42,105diversity immigrantscomprised 3.9% of all LPRs. The top five countries in FY2002 (the latest year for which detailed data are available)were Albania,Ethiopia, Nigeria, Poland, and the Ukraine.

As Table 1 details, these five countries have consistently ranked among the top diversity visa sending countries, along withBangladesh, Bulgaria, Morocco, Romania, and Russia. Citizens of Ireland, Poland, and the former Soviet Unionwon the most visasin the mid-1990s, but their participation in the lottery has fallen in recent years. Albania ranks as the top sendingcountry for thisentire period, followed by Nigeria. The numbers for Russia and Ukraine may be understated because nationals whoqualified fromsome of the post-Soviet nations reported that they were born in the Soviet Union.

Table 1. Top Diversity Visa Sending Countries, FY1997-FY2002

Source: CRS analysis of USCIS admissions data, reported by DHS Office of Immigration Statistics.

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The sending world regions for diversity visas, as intended, differ substantially from the sending regions for family-based andemployment-based immigration. As Figure 1 illustrates, European immigrants comprised 39.4%of the diversity visa recipients incontrast to 10.4% of the family-based and employment-based immigrants in FY2002. African immigrants received38.1% of thediversity visas in contrast to 3.6% of the family-based and employment-based visas. Caribbean, Latin American,and Asianimmigrants dominated family-based and employment-based immigration, and as a result, made up much smallerpercentages of thediversity visa immigrants. (3)

Eligibility

To be eligible for a diversity visa, the INA requires that an alien must have a high school education or the equivalent, or two yearsexperience in an occupation which requires at least two years of training or experience. (4) The alien or the alien's spouse must be anative of one of the countries listed as a foreign state qualified for the diversity visa lottery.

Diversity lottery winners, like all other aliens wishing to come to the United States, must undergo reviews performed by Departmentof State consular officers abroad and DHS inspectors upon entry to the U.S. (5) These reviews are intended to ensure that they are notineligible for visas or admission under the grounds for inadmissibility spelled out in the INA. (6) These criteria for exclusion aregrouped into the following categories:

health-related grounds;

criminal history;

security and terrorist concerns;

public charge (e.g., indigence);

seeking to work without proper labor certification;

illegal entrants and immigration law violations;

ineligible for citizenship; and,

aliens previously removed.

FY2005 Lottery

The State Department announced the FY2005 lottery on August 19, 2003. The 60-day application period began on November 1, 2003and ended on December 30, 2003. (7) For the first time,applications for the diversity lottery must have been submitted electronically. Entrants received an electronic confirmation notice upon receipt of a completed entry form. Paper forms were notaccepted. Sincethe objective of the diversity lottery is to encourage immigration from regions with lower immigration rates, nativesof countries withhigh admissions are usually ineligible. For FY2005, the ineligible countries were: Canada, China (mainland born),Columbia,Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea,the United Kingdomand dependent territories, and Vietnam. (8)

When applying for a diversity visa, petitioners had to follow the instructions issued by the State Department precisely. If there wereany mistakes or inconsistencies with the petition, it may have been disqualified by the State Department. In theFY2003 lottery, over2 million of the 8.7 million applications were disqualified for failure to comply with the instructions. (9) Aliens who submit more thanone application are supposed to be disqualified, but husbands and wives may submit separate entries even thoughspouses andunmarried children under the age of 21 qualify as derivative beneficiaries of successful applicants. Any derivativebeneficiary must belisted on the petition when it is initially filed, and the derivative beneficiary visas are counted against the 50,000visa cap. If adiversity lottery winner dies before obtaining LPR status, the visa is automatically revoked and derivativebeneficiaries are no longerentitled to diversity visa classification. (10)

Once all acceptable applications were received by the visa center, the winners were selected randomly by computer. Petitioners whowere not selected were not notified by the State Department. The State Department is expected to notify the winnersof the FY2005diversity lottery by mail between May and July 2004, and their visas will be issued between October 1, 2004 andSeptember 30, 2005. Winning the first round of the FY2005 lottery does not guarantee a visa, because the State Department draws moreapplications thanthe number of visas available. Therefore, winners must be prepared to act quickly to file the necessarydocumentation demonstratingto the State Department that they are admissible as LPRs. The applications are processed on a first-come,first-served basis. Aliensmust complete this process before September 30, 2005 to receive visas. (11) In person interviews are expected to begin in October2004.

Issues

Some question the continuation of the diversity visa lottery, given that family members often wait years for a visa to immigrate to theUnited States. They state a preference that the 55,000 visas be used for backlog reduction of the other visacategories. Supporters ofthe diversity visa, however, point to the immigration dominance of nationals from a handful of countries and arguethat the diversityvisa provides "new seed" immigrants for an immigration system weighted disproportionately to family-basedimmigrants.

Some are arguing that the INA should be amended to prevent nationals from countries that the United States identifies as sponsors ofterrorism from participating in the diversity visa lottery. These critics maintain that the difficulties of performingbackground checksin these countries as well as broader concerns about terrorism should prompt this change. Supporters of current lawobserve thatLPRs coming to the United States in other visa categories are not restricted if they come from nations that sponsorterrorism andargue that the policy should be uniformly applied.

Who should bear the costs of operating the lottery has also arisen as a issue. Those aliens who win the lottery pay a fee with their visaapplication, but some argue that a fee should be charged to enter the lottery as well. The diversity visa has beencriticized asvulnerable to fraud and misuse, but the State Department maintains that they are addressing these concerns.