Is Nigeria No Longer Eligible for Green Card Lottery?

The Green Card Lottery is coming up and registrants eagerly await the list of countries designated ineligible for diversity visas.

The U.S. Department of State has not yet released any information for DV-2015 (the official name of the Green Card Lottery which will begin in 2013), but it is expected to begin in early October of 2013.

Every year, a certain set of countries are announced where their denizens are not allowed to participate in the diversity visa lottery.

These countries are selected based on their history of immigration numbers over the previous five years.

Countries that send large amounts of immigrants to the United States during this period of time are put on the list.

Immigrants who are from these designated countries still have a way to get around this requirement sometimes. For example, they can claim their parent’s nationalities if they are from an accepted country. The nationalities of spouses can also be claimed by people who wish to enter the Green Card Lottery.

It appears that Nigeria will be one of the designated countries for DV-2015 because of extensive immigration numbers in recent years.

Online sources claim that the most recently released immigration statistics from the U.S. government support this supposition.

However, these claims have not been supported by the governing agencies of the Green Card Lottery. The public will frankly not know for sure until that information is released.

In the news recently there has been a great deal of talk about ending the Green Card Lottery. While this is a possibility during a period of such great upheaval in immigration reform, the U.S. Congress will have to use both houses to eradicate the lottery.

Getting both the House and the Senate to agree on this issue at this time will be a great challenge and it is unlikely anything will be done this year.