How To Enter The American Green Card Lottery?
Entering the American Green Card Lottery is pretty simple.
The only thing required is to meet two straightforward requirements:
1. You must have been born in an eligible country
2. You must meet an education or training requirement.
So what is an eligible country?
Every year the State Department announces countries whose natives are ineligible for applying for the American Green Card or Diversity Visa Lottery. The ineligible countries are those countries that have sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the past 5 years.
If your country isn’t one of such ineligible countries, it is an eligible country and you can apply for the green card lottery.
For example, for the American Green Card Lottery for 2009 (DV-2009), these countries were on the ineligible list:
Brazil, Canada, China (mainland born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories,and Vietnam. All other countries were eligible.
This list can change and so you have to check with the State Department for the list of ineligible countries for the year in which you are applying for the Diversity Visa Lottery.
Can you still apply if you are born in an ineligible country?
The directive of the State Department is very explicit about this matter:
You must have been born in an eligible country, or have parents who were born in eligible countries and who were not residents of your country of birth, when you were born. For example, your parents might have lived temporarily in the ineligible country because of their jobs.
So you either meet this requirement or don’t. There is no way around it.
Even then some green card lottery scam artists tell people that there is a way by which people from ineligible countries still can be “qualified” to enter the lottery. Don’t fall for this line.
The only thing that you could perhaps do here is to hope that the State Department takes your country off the ineligible countries list in a future drawing.
However if you are lucky to be from one of the eligible countries then the second requirement is pretty easy. Almost anybody can meet the education or training requirement.
How qualified or trained do you need to be?
According to the State Department:
Entrants must meet an education or training requirement.
You will have met the education requirement if you have a high school education or have successfully completed a 12-year course of elementary and secondary education.
You will have met the training requirement if you have at least two years of work experience within the past five years in an occupation requiring at least two years of training or experience to perform. The U.S. Department of Labor’s O*Net OnLine database will be used to determine qualifying work experience.
Note here that you have to meet only one of the requirements - educational or occupational. None of them is too hard to meet.
However, if you lack any of these qualifications, you can easily get the required level of education or training to become eligible to apply for the US American Green Card Lottery.
