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Comment by proberts | Hacker News Reader

Good point and depending on country of nationality, the odds can in fact be pretty good.

Having been born in Oman, a country with historically low rates of immigration to the United States, I have never won in years of applications.

Are the odds still good?

How many times did you try? I think the rate is like 2-3% for most countries.

Here are the odds, by country. Rate of legal immigration doesn't seem to be a primary determinate for that country's odds. www.usagreencardlottery.org/green-card-statistics.jsp

Slight nit: you want to add http to that so it gets linkified.

Thanks for posting it. It's super-interesting. I always suspected the chance for my country (Australia) was _reasonably_ good. This bears that out. In fact it might even be higher (5%) than I'd expected.

That being said I tried like 6-8 times and never won. But that's not too surprising even at 1 in 20.

In fact I think I've only ever met one person who had won this. As it happened he was from Russia.

There are quotas by "geographic region" (roughly, continent): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa#Distr...

Oceania (Australia, New Zealand and some other islands) happens to have few applicants relative to its regional quota.

What does "Winning Chances" mean? It is often very different from "Winning % By Country".

I had trouble figuring that out as well. Maybe it's "total wins proportion-out-of-100"? It seems to scale with the absolute count.

If it is that, then it's a terrible name.

also, can one apply for Green card lottery while they are on TN visa?

Not a lawyer, eligibility is based upon being born in a country with low immigration to the US. I neither Canada nor Mexico qualify although I can't find the exact list right now.

I'm an Australian citizen but was born in Pakistan. Do I go in the Australian queue or Pakistani queue for green card lottery?

You go in the Pakistani queue. One of my friend who is an Indian citizen can apply because he was born in Kuwait while folks who were born in India cannot apply.

How stupid. I am an Australian for all intents and purposes.

If you're married to an Australian (non-Pakistani), you can "cross-charge" your GC application to your spouse. This is true for employer-based GC, may apply to diversity visa as well.

I believe one of the reason for having that rule is to prevent people buying citizenship of some poor country and then use that to apply for the lottery.

Selecting by country of birth prevents those shenanigans.

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