On May 1, 2013, the winners of the 2014 Green Card Lottery were selected and the winners will be contacted by the Kentucky Consular Center over the next few months.
Registrants who wish to know if they should be expecting a visa package or if they need to re-apply next year can check the status of their application online at the State Department’s website.
All you need to check if you have won the Diversity Visa Lottery is the full name of the applicant (as it appears on the application) and the confirmation number that was generated and presented to the registrant upon completion of the application.
But how many people actually won this much sought after contest?
The simple answer is that about 100,000 people “won” the Diversity Visa Lottery, however this number is somewhat misleading.
100,000 people were selected in the registration and are allowed to then proceed to applying for their visas. Only about half of these people will receive a green card and the right to live and work in the United States.
The reason why so many are selected during registration and only 50,000 are issued green cards in the end is because many registrants are found to be inadmissible during the visa application process. The visa application process for DV-2012 takes place in the latter part of 2013.
The number of winners also differs between countries and continents. Since the goal of the program is to increase diversity in the United States immigration system, some countries and continents are cut off from the Green Card Lottery selection.
The actual number of immigrants issued green cards every year through the Diversity Visa Lottery varies quite a bit, but it normally falls in between 48,000 and 53,000 visas issued.