my mom won the green card lottery 10 years ago, when I was still young and surely wouldn't have been very useful or profitable. 10 years later, I'm getting my master's at one of the best universities I could've hoped for, and a pretty good chance of being able to do interesting work with competitive pay. I'm extremely grateful for the lottery, which is the one thing that made all of this possible.

my mom also got a chance to actually apply her computer science degree (which she couldn't do before because of the explicit sexism which meant women were generally employed as, perhaps glorified, receptionists), and now works as a senior software engineer at a large company. I imagine her true potential would also have been difficult to estimate prior to the move, as she'd done very little actual programming after college - but she effectively got a fresh start here, and was able to quickly advance in an environment which allowed her to be judged solely on technical competency.