State Department, Feb. 11, 2025 "The White House issued Executive Order "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" on January...
OFLC, Feb. 14, 2025 OFLC Releases Public Disclosure Data and Selected Program Statistics for Q1 of Fiscal Year 2024 The Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) has released a comprehensive set...
Lapadat v. Bondi "As appellate judges, we generally defer to the reasoned and expert judgment of our colleagues in the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”), whom we trust to carefully...
Visa Bulletin for March 2025 Notes D, E and F: D. RETROGRESSION IN THE EMPLOYMENT-BASED FOURTH PREFERENCE (EB-4) CATEGORY Due to high demand and number use throughout the first half of the fiscal...
NILC, Feb. 6, 2025 "In one of his first anti-immigrant Executive Orders (EOs), President Trump threatened to make undocumented immigrants “register” with the U.S. government or face...
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE 2021 DIVERSITY IMMIGRANT VISA PROGRAM (DV-2021)
Program Overview
The Department of State annually administers the statutorily-mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) provides for a class of immigrants known as “diversity immigrants” from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States. For Fiscal Year 2021, 55,000 Diversity Visas (DVs) will be available. There is no cost to register for the DV program.
Applicants who are selected in the program (selectees) must meet simple but strict eligibility requirements to qualify for a diversity visa. The Department of State determines selectees through a randomized computer drawing. The Department of State distributes diversity visas among six geographic regions, and no single country may receive more than seven percent of the available DVs in any one year.
For DV-2021, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply, because more than 50,000 natives of these countries immigrated to the United States in the previous five years:
Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, 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. [More...]