Initial statistics in for US Diversity Visa (DV-2008) program

During the two-month electronic registration period for the United States Diversity Visa Lottery (otherwise known as the Green Card Lottery), over 6.4 million entries were received. Taking into account dependents, there are 10 million participants in the 2008 Diversity Visa Lottery.

The largest percentages of applicants were from Africa and Asia. 41 percent were from Africa, 38 percent from Asia, 19 percent from Europe, and the last 2 percent comprised South America, Central America and the Caribbean. By country, the largest number of applicants were from Bangladesh (over 1.7 million applicants) followed by Nigeria (684,735) and Ukraine (619,584). The number of winning entries by country will be available after the random lottery process is conducted next year.

According to the U.S. Department of State, the registration process makes it easier to apply and increases the Department's ability to screen for fraudulent entries. Facial recognition and data mining will be used to eliminate duplicate cases.

Winners will be notified by mail from the Kentucky Consular Center confirming the name, date of birth, and country of chargeability for the registrant, as well as a time and date stamp when the entries were registered. Notification will be sent to the winning entrants by mail between April and July of 2007, along with further instructions including fee information for immigrating to the United States.

The Department of State has said that there have been attempts to defraud entrants. Only the Department of State's Kentucky Consular Center will notify winners. No other organization of company is authorized by the Department of State to contact winning entrants.

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