Green Card Lottery vs. New York Lottery

Each year, millions of people around the world aspire to immigrate to the U.S. lawfully to pursue the American dream and get rich. One way is to enter the “green card lottery” administered by the Department of State, try to win what's called a diversity visa, become a lawful U.S. permanent resident, and then work incredibly hard to accumulate wealth. The other way is to, well, just play the lottery. How do the odds compare? Is it easier to win the Green Card Lottery or the New York Lottery? Let’s do the math.

New York Lottery: We’ll use the New York Lotto game as our lottery example. To play the New York Lotto, you pick any six numbers from 1 through 59. If the six numbers you pick match the six numbers that are chosen in a random drawing, you win the lotto jackpot. Easy game.

To calculate the odds of winning the 6/59 lotto, we need to know the total number of possible combinations. We remember from our third grade math class that the number of combinations is determined as follows, where n=59 and k=6:You can use your scientific calculator to find the answer. If you have Excel on your computer, the formula is “=combin(59,6)”. There are 45,057,474 combinations in the New York Lotto. (FYI, for those who fancy the Mega Millions lottery game, the number of combinations is combin(56,5) * 46 for the mega ball = 175,711,536.)

The odds of winning the New York Lottery is 1 in 45,057,474.

Green Card Lottery: The Green Card Lottery, also known as the Diversity Visa (DV) lottery, is an immigration program administered by the U.S. Department of State. The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act provides that up to 55,000 Diversity Visas are available each year to persons from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the U.S. The goal is to promote ethnic diversity. Anyone from these countries who meet certain basic qualifications can enter the lottery by filling out a simple, free online application during a specified registration period each year. A computer-generated random lottery drawing then selects individuals from among the entrants to receive the Diversity Visas. The persons who are selected can then complete the paperwork to gain U.S. permanent resident status. For the 2008 lottery (DV-2008), there were 50,000 Diversity Visas available to people from over 180 countries and regions.

(The rules are actually a bit more complicated. The DVs are distributed among 6 geographic regions; more visas go to regions with low rates of immigration, and no visas go to countries sending >50,000 immigrants to the U.S. in the past 5 years. Within each region, each country is capped at 7% of the available DVs in any one year. Also, because it is likely that some of the first 50,000 persons selected will not qualify or pursue their visa cases, more than 50,000 entries will be selected to ensure that all 50,000 of the available DVs are issued. For ease of calculation, we will ignore all these variables, and assume that 50,000 DVs are available.)

According the U.S. Department of State, there were “over 6.4 million” entries for the DV-2008 lottery. For our calculation, we will assume that there were 6.4 million entries. To calculate the odds of winning the Diversity Visa Lottery, divide the number of Diversity Visas available by the number of entries and simplify the fraction. 50,000/6,400,000 = 1/128.

The odds of winning the Green Card Lottery is 1 in 128.

Pick Your Odds: A person is 350,000 times more likely to win the Green Card Lottery than the New York Lottery. Given the excellent odds of the Green Card Lottery, the ease of entering the lottery online and the grand prize of lawful U.S. permanent resident status, the Green Card Lottery is an option that many foreigners should consider pursuing as a viable way to enter America lawfully. Think of it as a form of U.S. government sponsored online gaming. Go for it. Hey, You Never Know!