Backup diversity lotto submission

[Musicsaves 64]

Hi all, ny husband and I have an i-130 in process currently. Because I'm super nervous about approval for several reasons being 1. We are using a co-sponsor because I am on SSD, 2. We've only had 3 in person visits because I'm a single mom and he was denied a visitor visa so money and travel time with a child make things difficult,  and 3. I am 13 years older than him. I'm wondering if he should submit an entry for the diversity lottery as a back up plan in case we are denied or sent to admin processing. Thanks in advance!

[Boiler 43,437]

No downside in doing so.

[Cyberfx1024 7,978]

7 minutes ago, Musicsaves said:

Hi all, ny husband and I have an i-130 in process currently. Because I'm super nervous about approval for several reasons being 1. We are using a co-sponsor because I am on SSD, 2. We've only had 3 in person visits because I'm a single mom and he was denied a visitor visa so money and travel time with a child make things difficult,  and 3. I am 13 years older than him. I'm wondering if he should submit an entry for the diversity lottery as a back up plan in case we are denied or sent to admin processing. Thanks in advance!

I would not submit a diversity lottery application at all. 

 

You have several things going in your favor: 1. You had 3 in person visits with each other 2. You are only 13 years older which. 

[geowrian 22,335]

No harm in trying.

[SusieQQQ 11,584]

It takes maybe 15 minutes, costs nothing and has no downside, only an (admittedly tiny probability of) upside. May as well do it.

[Musicsaves 64]

29 minutes ago, Cyberfx1024 said:

I would not submit a diversity lottery application at all. 

 

You have several things going in your favor: 1. You had 3 in person visits with each other 2. You are only 13 years older which. 

I think your reply cut off?

Is there a reason you advise against it? Thank you!

[Roel 7,191]

Not sure how you can consider it "backup plan" when the chances of winning the DV lottery are, in fact, pretty small.

 

In this case, I'd actually call your I-130 "backup plan" lol.

[geowrian 22,335]

11 minutes ago, Roel said:

Not sure how you can consider it "backup plan" when the chances of winning the DV lottery are, in fact, pretty small.

 

In this case, I'd actually call your I-130 "backup plan" lol.

I work in IT....if my backups had a < 1% chance of success, I'd be in some deep trouble.

[Musicsaves 64]

I didn't realize it was such a low chance. I thought it might be a certain amount from each country and veing that he's not from a high immigration country I thought he might have a chance...

[geowrian 22,335]

9 minutes ago, Musicsaves said:

I didn't realize it was such a low chance. I thought it might be a certain amount from each country and veing that he's not from a high immigration country I thought he might have a chance...

The chances vary based on region due to allocations and # of applicants. But typically it's a couple percentage points chance at most. I think itr's either New Zealand or Australia with the highest chance at around 6.x% or so?

[SusieQQQ 11,584]

1 hour ago, Musicsaves said:

I didn't realize it was such a low chance. I thought it might be a certain amount from each country and veing that he's not from a high immigration country I thought he might have a chance...

There is a quota but it’s a maximum (max 7% of the total visas may go to one country), no minimum.  For last DV there were almost 14.5m entrants, rising to 22.5m if you include derivatives, and they select around 100000 and give visas to 50000 people (including derivatives). So you can see chances are minuscule just to be selected, and not everyone selected gets as far as actually getting a visa. Obviously, somebody has to win (I did), and you can’t win it if you don’t enter, but it’s definitely not something to expect to happen. FYI last year there were 430 people selected from Romania (including derivatives, so very rough rule of thumb is actual number of winning entries being about half of that).

(Btw none of the countries in DV are high immigration countries, that’s the criteria for countries being in there in the first place, so he doesn’t have any advantage over other entrants from that perspective)

Edited October 26, 2018 by SusieQQQ

[Musicsaves 64]

12 minutes ago, SusieQQQ said:

There is a quota but it’s a maximum (max 7% of the total visas may go to one country), no minimum.  For last DV there were almost 14.5m entrants, rising to 22.5m if you include derivatives, and they select around 100000 and give visas to 50000 people (including derivatives). So you can see chances are minuscule just to be selected, and not everyone selected gets as far as actually getting a visa. Obviously, somebody has to win (I did), and you can’t win it if you don’t enter, but it’s definitely not something to expect to happen. FYI last year there were 430 people selected from Romania (including derivatives, so very rough rule of thumb is actual number of winning entries being about half of that).

(Btw none of the countries in DV are high immigration countries, that’s the criteria for countries being in there in the first place, so he doesn’t have any advantage over other entrants from that perspective)

Thank you so much for this detailed response SusieQQQ!!!! 💗😘

[Jorge V 195]

You can check the statistics here, https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrate/diversity-visa-program-entry/diversity-visa-program-statistics.html . In 2018 there were 79,583 entrants from Romania and 516 were selected. This comes out to about a 0.65% (or 1 per 154) chance of winning.

Edited October 27, 2018 by Jorge V

[Cathi 5,610]

My husband and I had many more so called red flags and we had no issues at any point during his visa/naturalization processes.