Author DVLottery.me 2019-08-11

The DV Lottery is the most popular and simple way to get a Permanent Residence Card of the United States more known as the Green Card. Do you know when it started and what was the idea behind the Lottery? We’ll tell you everything, keep reading!

America is the country of immigrants and there are all ethnicities from around the world in it. So the main idea and goal of the DV Lottery Program is to protect American cultural diversity and also maintain the image of the USA as a country of possibilities, attract a large number of ambitious and active people.

In 1987 the former U.S. president Ronald Reagan passed a bill to give amnesty and permanent resident cards to 2 million Mexicans living illegally in the USA and he was worried about the waning ethnic diversity of the United States. So the idea was to restore and preserve the national diversity of the country via the Green Card Lottery. The requirements for participants were made rather simple so that almost everyone could have a chance to immigrate to the USA. See the list of requirements here: https://dvlottery.me/blog/300-main_requirements_for_green_card_lottery .

The first version of the Green Card Lottery was established in 1987 and was named “NP-5 Lottery Program”. 5000 visas were issued for participants from 36 countries annually for two years. A couple years later the number of visas was increased to 15,000 per lottery.

In 1990 and 1991 the program was called “OP-1 Program” and there were issued 10,000 visas. The next 2 years the program was renamed to “AA-1 Program” and was established as a temporary solution and gave away 40,000 visas for 37 countries. Interestingly, 16,000 of them were reserved for Northern Ireland.

Only in 1994 this program was transformed to its current familiar version which gives 55,000 visas for all countries except those countries from which there are lots of immigrants (more than 50,000 residents have legally emigrated to the USA in the last five years). Every year the list of ineligible countries changes. See the list here: https://dvlottery.me/blog/300-main_requirements_for_green_card_lottery .

In 2003 the online registration system was created. Until 2002 all lottery applications had to be sent in the paper form by mail to the US authorities. Millions of applications were manually processed.

Now you can easily make a correct photo thanks for the service https://visafoto.com/diversity-visa-lottery-photo and submit your application online on the official website https://dvlottery.state.gov . Cool, isn’t it? You can also train and see what is in the DV Lottery form before it opens here: https://dvlottery.me/ds-5501-edv-form .