Diversity Immigrant Visa
immigration lottery for entry into the United States
The Diversity Immigrant Visa program, also known as the green card lottery, is a United States government lottery program for receiving an immigrant visa followed by a permanent resident card. The Immigration Act of 1990 established the current and permanent Diversity Visa (DV) program.
The lottery is administered by the Department of State and conducted under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). It provides up to 55,000 immigrant visas annually and aims to diversify the immigrant population in the United States, by selecting applicants from countries with low numbers of immigrants in the previous five years. More than 22 million people apply for the lottery each year, which means that fewer than 1 in 400 applicants receive visas.
Applicants enter the lottery by completing a form on the Department of State website.
Attempts have been made to end the program since 2005.
History
Legislative and administrative history
Starting in 1986, the United States established several temporary immigrant visa programs outside of the usual immigration preferences (family members or by employment). The first program was NP-5, run from 1987 to 1989, where a limited number of visas was issued on a first-come, first-served basis. The second program was OP-1, run through a lottery from 1989 to 1991 and available for natives of countries with low levels of recent immigration to the United States.
The public source identifies “Diversity Immigrant Visa” as immigration lottery for entry into the United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Diversity, Immigrant and Visa.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7048017. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 2005, 1986 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Diversity Immigrant Visa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.