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Green card lottery registrants - email addresses now required
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We recently highlighted the fact that very little changed from last year’s DV-2010 diversity visa lottery to this year’s DV-2011 lottery. The list of ineligible countries are the same: Brazil, Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam.
And the photograph requirements are the same (600x600 pixels, full 24-bit color, jpg format, file size less than or equal to 240K). Personal eligibility requirements are also identical—proof of the equivalent to a 12-year U.S. high school secondary education, or experience in an accepted occupation.
However, we did find one little-noticed change to the rules this year. The U.S. State Department Kentucky Consular Center (KCC) – the Williamsburg, Kentucky division that handles lottery selections – now requires your email address. Previously an email address was optional. This is now Question #11 of the new E-DV registration.
An email address will be important because one of the biggest problems for the KCC is contacting the lottery winners. Winning notifications are now only sent by postal mail. For this reason, applicants who may change their physical address within the next 8 months are usually advised to use a lottery service since they have a stable address. However, as the KCC moves to add electronic communication, this too could present problems for those applicants who only use temporary free email addresses. If their email address changes, or if messages from the KCC are accidently classified as spam, applicants may miss critical information. So, it may still be better to rely on a service to receive your physical mail and forward it to you, and follow up both by phone and by email until they reach you. This highlights the need to use an ethical and highly rated service that is responsive to all forms of communication.
According to Holger Zimmerman, owner of the American Dream at green-card.com, "Only about 10% of our customers do not have an email address, but they can absolutely rely on us to forward their winning notice and U.S. State Department forms. Furthermore, our computer system will assign a unique and permanent email address to those customers based on their customer number, such as: 2-908-307@green-card.com”.
Remember, you have until noon Eastern Standard Time on November 30, 2009 (45 days) to register for DV-2011. Save your 16-digit confirmation number (i.e. 20111O0DZWY3DOV9). And if you use a lottery service they should send your confirmation number to you within a few days of your entry either by email, postal mail, or both. And if you have your number you can easily check to see if you win this year’s lottery beginning in July 2010. As always, if you win the lottery, you or your lottery service will receive a package of forms from the U.S. State Department, also by July.
If your lottery service does not provide your confirmation number then contact them. If they do not reply to your satisfaction, post a comment at the United States Association of Immigrants Discussion Forum at myUSAi. You can also use this Forum to ask general questions about the green card lottery or get answers to visa issues with a licensed Immigration attorney.
In the next installment on our Green Card Lottery series, we will examine the chances of winning the lottery in detail.
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