Green Card Lottery

AN IMPORTANT date for people wishing to emigrate to the US is October 4, which starts the 60 day application period for the “Green Card Lottery” ending on December 3. As in previous years there are numerous ineligible countries, they are as follows: Canada, China (mainland born and Macau), Colombia, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Ireland and Northern Ireland ) and its dependent territories. People born in Hong Kong and Taiwan are eligible.

All applications must now be submitted electronically with the State Department at www.dvlottery.state.gov. It is generally believed that you can enter the green card lottery without the assistance of an attorney. This may be true, although the State Department has issued 19 pages of “simple instructions.”

If a person wins the lottery but is illegally present in the US they may have problems actually getting the green card as, unless you filed an application under S245(i) of the Immigration and Naturalization act, you would have to leave the US in order to receive the green card.

If you have been illegally present in the US for more than six months you may be subject to the three- and 10-year bars.

There are one or two situations where British people are eligible to apply. One is if a person has a spouse born in the one of the eligible countries (ie, every country other than the ones listed above). The other is if the person was born in Northern Ireland.

It should be understood that approximately 90,000 “winners” will be notified by the Department of State. There are, in fact, only 50,000 green cards issued. Given that most winners will have families you have to figure that there are about 200,000 people competing for the 50,000 green cards. Clearly it would be necessary to get green card applications filed as quickly and accurately as possible after receiving notification of winning the lottery.

In my opinion, if you read the instructions very carefully and follow them to the letter you can do it yourself. However, if you win, I highly recommend hiring a qualified attorney (not a consultant) to file the green card application.

On another note, when readers of the Telegraph newspaper were asked shortly after September 11, 2001 if security fears had made them think twice about traveling to America 89 percent said no. But in a recent survey 90 percent said they would avoid flying to the United States. The main reason wasn’t security fears but belligerent US immigration officials, whom one Briton called “sarcastic, suspicious, patronizing and downright rude.”

International travel has jumped nearly 20 percent since 2000 but the US share of the world travel market slipped from nine percent in 2000 to six percent last year.

Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the Association of British Travel Agents, said America is still the most popular destination for British travelers after Spain and France and a record 4.2 million people from Britain visited in 2004. But he agreed that many have been put off by rude immigration officials. “We’ve had British tourists say they won’t return to America because of this” he said.

Allyson Stewart-Allen , who runs International Marketing Partners, a consulting firm in London, said the State Department is aware it has a problem with how it welcomes visitors saying “Even basic civilities like saying please and thank you would be a terrific start.”

Also, this week the US Citizenship and Immigration Service said it will meet its goal of reducing the average wait for immigration services to six months by the end of September.

The agency formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service also said the total number of pending cases that exceeded the six months wait period fell from 3.8 million in January 2004 to 1.1 million by July of this year.

“It is really a Herculean achievement that we’ve been able to achieve this” Emilio Gonzalez, the agency’s director told reporters.

Nearly one million applications will still be pending at the start of October, said Michael Ayetes, director of USCIS field operations. However, he said the agency considers these outside their control because they are awaiting feedback from other agencies such as the FBI, or information/documents from applicants.

In July 2001, the President asked the agency to establish a six-month standard from start to finish for processing immigration applications.

A couple of types of services that still face backlogs are relative petitions where US citizens request permanent resident for a relative and asylum applications. The offices with the biggest numbers of backlogs are New York, Miami and Atlanta.

This article was first published in October 2006