Newsletter May 2011 – The Green Card Lottery Re-Do
May 19th, 2011 by Eric J. Ramos
The True American DREAM: Act Now
States That Allow Acting on a Dream
Immigration Reform in President Obama’s Own Words
The Faces of US Immigrants: John Muir, Founder of the Sierra Club
Recipes from the Melting Pot: Dhal Rice, A Recipe from India
The Green Card Lottery Re-Do
Every year, the U.S. Government makes 50,000 green cards randomly available to individuals from qualified countries through their Diversity Visa or Green Card Lottery Program. This program provides certain individuals another way of obtaining a Green Card. Recently, over 22,000 applicants worldwide were mistakenly told that they were eligible for the green card visa program because of a computer error. The results of the draw were invalid because they did not represent a fair selection of the applicant pool.
Due to a computer programming error 90 percent of those that were selected came from the pool of applicants from the first two days that registration for the Green Card Lottery was opened to individuals rather than from the entire applicant pool encompassing the 30-day registration period.
In the last registration period in late 2010, at least 19.6 million people applied for the visas through the Diversity Visa Program.
The lottery will be redrawn on July 15. And unfortunately for those 22,000 applicants that were originally chosen, they will have to hope and wait…again.
