Green Card Lottery: 15M Entries for 50K Spots

Are you a foreign citizen that wants to live and work legally in the United States? Just enter the lottery.

A longstanding government program hands out 50,000 green cards each year to foreign applicants who do nothing more than put their name in a hat. A record 15 million people applied this year, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The lottery may seem like an internet scam - indeed a Google search reveals that it has spawned hundreds of unscrupulous phishing sites and sites promising assistance or even an advantage in the drawing. But strange as it may seem, it is a real State Department program, established in 1990 under the banner of promoting diversity.

Participation in the lottery has grown steadily as people in the developing world have gained increasing access to the internet. (The application must be filled out online.)

"The annual lottery creates a buzz across the developing world. Applicants from Kenya to Khazakstan brave lines at Internet kiosks to fill out electronic entries. In the final hours of the month-long enrollment period, which this year closed Nov. 3, entries were rolling in at the rate of 62,000 an hour," the Journal reported.

Critics of the program say it - unsurprisingly - draws an uneducated and sometimes desperate clientele and that it prioritizes luck over the applications of would-be Americans who have spent years in the more traditional immigration process involving employee and family sponsorship.

Many people apply year after year. There is no limit on the number of applications or the number if times that the same person may apply. But only 7 percent of the winning group may come from any one country.