Drop in the Number of Applicants who Entered the DV-2013 Lottery Program

Diversity Visa lottery is popularly known as Green Card lottery. This is a program which is conducted officially by the American Government. People all over the world are allowed to participate in this program in order to get an immigrant visa. But individuals from certain regions are not eligible to enter this program. The areas that are ineligible to participate in the DV lottery program are the regions that have sent as much as 50,000 immigrants to the US over the past 5 years.

This lottery program is said to offer a quick path to permanent residence in the US. The DV lottery program selects 55, 000 people randomly for permanent residence in the US.

The number of people who entered the DV-2013 lottery program is only 8 million. This is less when compared to that of DV-2012 Diversity Visa lottery program. 15 million applicants had entered the program, last year. It is nearly a 50 percent drop in the number of applications this year. This drop is also likely to increase the chances of the 8 million people winning Green Cards.

So far, there is no fee to enter the DV lottery, but it is not going to be the same in the following years. The US Senate has decided to charge a fee to enter the DV-2015 program. The fee amount may be 30 USD. Hence, the number pf people who will enter the Green Card lottery program will still decrease. The US Senate has planned to use this fee to extend the federal benefits to the refugees in the US who are disabled. This fee will also help the expenditure of the program without adding to the US budget.

The reason for drop in the number of applications, this year is mainly because of the South Asian nation Bangladesh. Bangladesh is no longer in the list of countries classified under the low-immigration countries. Hence, people born in Bangladesh were not eligible to take part in the DV-2013 lottery program. For many years people from Bangladesh had been submitting a lot of applications. Out of the 15 million applicants, last year, 7.6 million applicants were from Bangladesh, which accounts to almost half the number of the applications.

Nigeria, Ukraine and Ghana are the three countries that submitted more number of entries this year. The Status information about the selected applicants in the DV-2013 Diversity Visa lottery program will be available as of May 1, 2012.