DV Program

The Diversity Visa lottery program is conducted by the American Government every year to distribute 50,000 immigrant visas through this lottery. This visa lottery program allows eligible people to apply for the dv lottery and those applicants must come from those countries which do sends low numbers of immigrants to the United States with in the last 5years. This is called as a lottery, but it is not a program where money or presents are involved. This is the US visa lottery program where eligible applicants can submit their entries online to be selected through the random draw.

The congressionally mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is administered on an annual basis by the Department of State and conducted under the terms of Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Section 131 of the Immigration Act of 1990 (Pub. L. 101-649) amended INA 203 to provide for a new class of immigrants known as "diversity immigrants" (DV immigrants). The Act makes available 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.
The annual DV program makes permanent resident visas available to persons meeting the simple, but strict, eligibility requirements. Applicants for the Diversity Visas are chosen by a computer generated random lottery draw. The visas, however, are distributed among six geographic regions with a greater number of visas going to regions with lower rates of immigration to the USA, and with no visas going to citizens of countries which are 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 total available Diversity Visas in any one year.
As for the State Department announcement this year, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply for the lottery. Because these countries had sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S in the past five years, they are:

BRAZIL, CANADA, CHINA (mainland-born), COLOMBIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, ECUADOR, EL SALVADOR, GUATEMALA, HAITI, INDIA, JAMAICA, MEXICO, PAKISTAN, PHILIPPINES, PERU, POLAND, SOUTH KOREA, UNITED KINGDOM (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and VIETNAM.
Persons born in Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR and Taiwan are eligible.

For the DV 2010 green card lottery natives of RUSSIA and Kosovo are eligible to participate.

The visa lottery is conducted in English language only and the visa lottery will be called after the fiscal year as DV 2011 or DV 2012 if they are going to issue visas in 2011 or 2012.

The winners in the DV Lottery program will not be given with the required visas simply but will be allowed to apply for them following the normal procedures. And at the interview they must proof their eligibility to the consular officer to be issued with the visas.

So all the selected winners of the DV lottery program, don't have the chance to get their American Immigrant visas.