WASHINGTON, Nov 5 (AFP) - The annual lottery for US immigrant visas got underway on Friday with 50,000 documents entitling recipients to permanent residence in the United States up for grabs to citizens of most countries.
The State Department, which administers the yearly "Diversity Visa" lottery, said it expected large numbers of people to enter the program for 2006, the registration period for which ends January 7.
Lottery entrants must register online at a designated website (www.dvlottery.state.gov) and the department said in a statement that it had tripled the number of servers hosting the site "in response to demand." Paper entries have not been allowed since last year.
The lottery makes permanent residence visas available to persons meeting simple, but strict, eligibility requirements.
The documents are distributed among six geographic regions with more visas going to regions with lower rates of immigration and no visas awarded to citizens of countries that have sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the past five years.
The department said citizens of the following countries are ineligible for the 2006 lottery: Britain (except Northern Ireland), Canada, China (except persons born in Hong Kong and Macau), Colombia, theb Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea and Vietnam.
11/05/2004 20:51 GMT - AFP