Dear Editor,
The Associated Press and MSNBC are reporting that the green card visas won in this month’s lottery have been nullified and the entire process will have to be redone. Some 20,000 people around the world won this year’s lottery to gain legal residency in the US. But the State Department, which oversees visas, said on Friday that there was a computer glitch in the selection process and that it will have to run the visa lottery again. The glitch is blamed on an in-house programming error, “dashing the hopes of the 20,000 winners but reopening the hopes of the near 15 million who had applied for the lottery process” to win a visa to come to the US. Winners are chosen at random making the odds of winning a visa very small. It is even smaller to win a second time. The visas become available next year and applicants would have had to submit their names online last October to qualify.
The programme, called the Diversity Visa Lottery, was enacted by Congress in 1994 to increase the number of immigrants from the developing world and from countries with traditionally low rates of immigration to the US. Guyana is included in it although it was excluded for a couple of years.
Applicants do not have to have the usual family or employer sponsor and those already in a sponsorship programme are not excluded from applying.
Once a person wins the lottery, he or she needs someone to offer income support. Winners can bring spouse and children. Guyanese are known to win the lottery.
The State Department apologized to this month’s winners whose names were posted on line. The Department said: “Any results previously posted and available through the website are considered invalid. We sincerely regret any inconvenience or disappointment this problem might have caused.”
According to the AP story, the lottery selects 90,000 names from the pool of online entrants which this year totalled some 15 million. The article says “that number is winnowed to 50,000 winners through attrition, interviews and educational and occupational rules.”
A new lottery will be held from the existing pool of entries with winners announced in mid-July. The State Department says applicants do not need to re-enter and no new entries will be accepted.
However, there are people who feel redoing the lottery is not fair and that those who won should be able to get their visas while the State Department allows another lottery for an additional 20,000 visas among the other applicants. That seems like a reasonable and fair suggestion.
Yours faithfully,
Vishnu Bisram
