News: 2009 Diversity Visa Lottery Registration To Start October 3

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2009 Diversity Visa Lottery Registration To Start October 3

Registration period ends December 2, 2007; applicants urged to apply early

Chinese visa seekers look through U.S. visa application forms at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, China. (? AP Images)

Washington -- Applicants for the United States' 2009 Diversity Visa Lottery (DV-2009) are encouraged to enter early in the two-month registration period because excessive demand might slow down the system as the deadline nears, according to the State Department.

The Diversity Visa Lottery registration period will be October 3 to December 2, 2007, the State Department announced September 25.

The Diversity Visa Lottery winners are selected in a computerized random drawing. Persons whose names are selected may apply for one of 50,000 Diversity Immigrant Visas made available each year. These visas are available only to persons from eligible countries with low immigration rates to the United States, according to the rules of the DV program.

Registration for the Diversity Visa Lottery is free. Persons seeking to enter the lottery must register online through the designated Web site (www.dvlottery.state.gov/), and digital photos must be submitted with the registration form. Paper entries will not be accepted.

The Department of State Kentucky Consular Center in Williamsburg, Kentucky, will notify the lottery winners by mail (NOT e-mail) between May 2008 and July 2008. The winners will be provided instructions on how to apply for DV-2009 visas, which will be issued between October 1, 2008, and September 30, 2009.

Lottery and visa applicants must meet certain education or work experience requirements. These are outlined in the DV-2009 instructions.

The DV-2009 lottery will mark the fifth year in which the registration process has been conducted entirely via the Internet.

Entries will be accepted between noon Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) (1600 GMT), Wednesday, October 3, 2007, and noon Eastern Standard Time (EST) (1700 GMT) Sunday, December 2, 2007. No entries will be accepted after that time, according to the DV-2009 instructions.

Applicants should be aware that there is only one official site for the diversity visa lottery registration (www.dvlottery.state.gov/), according to the State Department.

The visas will be distributed among six geographic regions, with a greater number of visas going to regions with lower rates of immigration. Natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply because those nations sent a total of more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States over the previous five years: Brazil, Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam.

Persons born in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, Macau SAR and Taiwan are eligible to apply for the DV program.

More than 6.4 million people submitted entries for the previous visa lottery, DV-2008, during the two-month registration period in late 2006. (See related article.)

For more information, see the full text of a State Department media note on the DV-2009 Diversity Visa Lottery. Instructions and the entry form for DV-2009, as well as a warning note on fake DV program sites, are available on the State Department Web site. The entry form will be available starting October 3.

The English language version of the DV-2009 Lottery Instructions currently is the only official version, according to the State Department. However, instructions will be available in other languages (on the instructions page) as translations become available.

For additional information on U.S. immigration policy, see Visas and Immigration.

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

Source:

http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display....rennef0.2379724