The Labor Department’s Board of Alien Labor Certification Appeals (BALCA) issued a number of decisions over the past few weeks. These decisions provide some insight into important labor certification issues. [Read more →]

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that a revised Employment Eligibility Verification Form (I-9) is now available for use. All employers are required to complete a Form I-9 for each employee hired in the United States.

The revision seeks to achieve full compliance with the document reduction requirements of the illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), which reduced the number of documents employers may accept from newly hired employees during the employment eligibility verification process. The revised Form I-9 is a further step in USCIS’ ongoing work toward reducing the number of documents used to confirm identity and work eligibility. [Read more →]

About 50,000 green cards are given away each year in the Diversity Visa Lottery. Online entry for the next lottery (”DV-2009″) begins at Noon EDT on October 3, 2007, and ends at Noon EST on December 2, 2007. Last year, more than 6.4 million entries were received. There is no fee for submitting an electronic lottery entry.

Go to Diversity Visa Electronic Entry Form for DV-2009.
Read Diversity Visa Lottery Instructions for DV-2009 (.pdf).

The congressionally mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is administered on an annual basis by the Department of State and conducted under the terms of Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Section 131 of the Immigration Act of 1990 (Pub. L. 101-649) amended INA 203 provides for a class of immigrants known as “diversity immigrants”. Section 203(c) of the INA provides a maximum of up to 55,000 Diversity Visas (DV) each fiscal year to be made available to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.

The annual DV program makes permanent residence visas available to persons meeting the simple, but strict, eligibility requirements. A computer-generated random lottery drawing chooses selectees for diversity visas. The visas, however, are distributed among six geographic regions with a greater number of visas going to regions with lower rates of immigration, and with no visas going to nationals of countries sending more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. over the period of the past five years. Within each region, no one country may receive more than seven percent of the available Diversity Visas in any one year.

For DV-2008, natives of the following countries were not eligible to apply because they sent a total of more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. over the period of the previous five years:

BRAZIL, CANADA, CHINA (mainland-born), COLOMBIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, EL SALVADOR, HAITI, INDIA, JAMAICA, MEXICO, PAKISTAN, PHILIPPINES, PERU, POLAND, RUSSIA, SOUTH KOREA, UNITED KINGDOM (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and VIETNAM. Persons born in Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR and Taiwan are eligible.

Are there any fees for the Diversity Visa Program?
There is no fee for submitting an electronic lottery entry. DV applicants must pay all required visa fees at the time of visa application directly to the consular cashier at the embassy or consulate. Details of required diversity visa and immigration visa application fees will be included with the instructions sent by the Kentucky Consular Center to applicants who are selected.

Do I qualify for the Diversity Visa Program?
You must have either a high school education or its equivalent, defined as successful completion of a 12-year course of elementary and secondary education; or two years of work experience within the past five years in an occupation requiring at least two years of training or experience to perform.

What Occupations qualify for the Diversity Visa Program?
The Department of Labor (DOL) O*Net Online Database groups job experience into five “job zones.” While many occupations are listed on the DOL Website, only certain specified occupations qualify for the Diversity Visa Program. To qualify for a Diversity Visa on the basis of your work experience, applicants must, within the past five years, have two years of experience in an occupation that is designated as Job Zone 4 or 5, classified in a Specific Vocational Preparation (SVP) range of 7.0 or higher.

Follow these steps to find out if your occupation qualifies: Select “Find Occupations” and then select a specific “Job Family”. For example, select Architecture and Engineering and click “GO”. Then click on the link for the specific Occupation. After selecting a specific Occupation link, select the tab “Job Zone” to find out the designated Job Zone number and Specific Vocational Preparation (SVP) rating range.

2008 Diversity Visa Lottery Registrations

Over 6.4 million entries for the 2008 Diversity Visa Lottery were received during the two-month electronic registration period, from October 4, 2006, through December 3, 2006. This is an increase from the more than 5.5 million applications received in the 2007 Diversity Visa Lottery. Taking into account dependents, there are more than 10 million participants in the 2008 Diversity Visa Lottery.

Most of the applications were from Africa and Asia with 41 percent of the total from Africa, 38 percent from Asia, 19 percent coming from Europe, and 2 percent coming from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. The largest number of applicants came from Bangladesh (more than 1.7 million applicants) followed by Nigeria (684,735) and Ukraine (619,584). The number of winning entries by country will be available after the random lottery process is conducted next year.

The electronic registration process makes it easier for applicants to apply and continues to increase the Department’s ability to screen against duplicate and other fraudulent entries. Anti-fraud technology using facial recognition and data mining will be used to eliminate duplicate cases.

Winners will be notified with a letter mailed from the Kentucky Consular Center confirming the name, date of birth, and country of chargeability for the registrant, as well as a time/date stamp when entries were registered. Notification will be sent to the winning entrants by mail only between April and July 2007 and will provide further instructions, including information on fees connected with immigration to the United States.

There have been several attempts to defraud Diversity Visa Lottery entrants. Lottery entrants selected as winners in the Diversity Visa random drawing are notified only by the Department of State’s Kentucky Consular Center. No other organization or company is authorized by the Department of State to contact winning entrants.

BIA Decision - August 15, 2007
The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) dismissed an appeal, filed by Connecticut immigration lawyer Joe Tapper, challenging an earlier finding by an Immigration Judge that an initial visa petition was not “approvable when filed” and therefore did not meet the grandfathering requirements under 8 C.F.R. § 1245.10. In order for a visa petition to be “approvable when filed,” the visa petition must have been (1) properly filed, (2) meritorious in fact, and (3) not frivolous.

Approvable when filed means that, as of the date of the filing of the qualifying immigrant visa petition under section 204 of the Act or qualifying application for labor certification, the qualifying petition or application was properly filed, meritorious in fact, and non-frivolous (“frivolous” being defined herein as patently without substance). This determination will be made based on the circumstances that existed at the time the qualifying petition or application was filed. A visa petition that was properly filed on or before April 30, 2001, and was approvable when filed, but was later withdrawn, denied, or revoked due to circumstances that have arisen after the time of filing, will preserve the alien beneficiary’s grandfathered status if the alien is otherwise eligible to file an application for adjustment of status under section 245(i) of the Act. 8 C.F.R. § 1245.10(a)(3) (emphasis added).

This appeal addressed the second prong - whether the inital visa petition was “meritorious in fact” - and illustrates that determinations will be made based on the circumstances that existed at the time the qualifying petitions or applications were filed. This standard applies to both marriage-based and employment-based adjustment of status applications filed under section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

For additional information on section 245(i) and the definition of “approvable when filed”, see

Yates Memo :: March 9, 2005 :: Approvable When Filed.