The Green Card Lottery is a congressionally mandated program that occurs every year.
Potential immigrants are allowed to register for the lottery for one month that normally starts in October and ends in November. The registration period is usually only one month long, so it is important to keep track of the dates of its opening and closing.
USAGreenCardLottery.org offers a service that allows you to fill out the Green Card Lottery application at any time of the year. This service ensures that your application is ready to be filed as soon as the registration period opens.
The opening date of the registration period is normally announced in May, the same month that the winners of the previous year are announced.
2013 is a peculiar year for the Green Card Lottery, though. The popularity of immigration reform as a political topic during the end of the 2012 presidential election and its prevalence in introduced legislation during the beginning of 2013 has presented some concerns about the future of the Green Card Lottery.
STEM
Conservative congress-people looking to implement immigration reform have begun to look towards a new immigration plan nicknamed STEM. This acronym stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which are areas of concern throughout the American economy.
These conservative legislators believe that if the United States is to grant more green cards as a matter of immigration reform, they should be granted to people with degrees or qualifications in these four fields of study.
This relates to the Green Card Lottery in that STEM green cards would effectively replace the lottery system. Re-appropriating those green cards to immigrants with lots of credentials, instead of giving them to immigrants with minimal qualifications (but diverse cultural backgrounds) has been a hot topic in January and February of 2013.
This is not to say that they have already decided that the Green Card Lottery will no longer be offered, but it might indicate that the lottery’s years are numbered.