How does EDV Lottery Works

This official program will make permanent residence visas available to persons meeting the simple, but strict, eligibility requirements. Applicants for Diversity Visa are chosen by a computer-generated random lottery drawing. The U.S. government makes available 50,000 permanent residence visas each year for this program. Application to this program is open for all individuals worldwide that fulfill the two basic entry requirements. The visas are distributed among six geographic regions with a greater number of visas going to regions with lower rates of immigration, and with no visas going to citizens of countries sending more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. in the past five years. Within each region, no one country may receive more than seven percent of the available Diversity Visas in any one year.