For years it has been the annual wild card of US immigration policy: a worldwide lottery in which millions gamble on winning a green card, and with it the chance to live and work legally in the US. But this year, with a Dec. 30 deadline looming and 55,000 green cards at stake, the lottery has attracted fewer than half the usual number of applications, falling to 5 million from as many as 13 million.
The startling drop-off, everyone agrees, results from the fact that for the first time applications are being accepted only by computer, and government officials say that has curtailed duplications and fraud.
But immigrants and their advocates say the falloff, while linked to the computerization, results from a variety of other factors: fear of giving information to the government online; lack of access to computers; and new opportunities for immigrants to be defrauded.
The falloff, and the different explanations, show that like so much else involving immigrants with government the lottery is being transformed by new perceptions of fear and uncertainty.
US State Department officials insist that the apparent decline is misleading. For the first time, the officials said, they can now electronically compare applications, automatically disqualify anyone who applies more than once, and store information about applicants. In the past, they point out, multiple applications often went undetected, including many from immigrants desperate to legalize their undocumented lives in New York.
But immigrants themselves say other reasons are also depressing the numbers. Some people simply lack access to the tools to apply: a digital photo scanner, a computer and an Internet connection. Some already in the US fear that leaving a computer trail could make them targets of deportation. And hundreds of thousands of others who thought that they were applying were tricked instead, by official-looking Web sites run by a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, couple living their own version of the American dream.
The couple, John Romano and Hoda Nofal, bought a US$1.5 million waterfront home, paid off more than US$739,000 in credit card debt and amassed a US$3.5 million bank account by fraudulently collecting fees for Internet lottery applications that were never submitted, according to criminal charges filed against them in October by federal authorities.
Now, with only a week to go, upstart businesses in computer shops, tax offices and basements all over New York are offering to help would-be applicants play the new odds. Some are scams, New York City officials warned last week. But many are just part of the age-old self-help network of former greenhorns.
A currency trader from Northern Ireland, for example, recently found aid at a tiny copy shop run by Bangladeshis on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, after discovering by chance that he was one of those conned by the Florida couple.
The copy shop, on West 77th Street, is so small that it offers only standing-room use of its two computers, for US$6 an hour. But two of the three Bangladeshi men behind the counter are past green card lottery winners, and they were already trying to help one of their own countrymen convert a passport photograph into digital pixels when the Irish trader confided his troubles.
"After about a dozen tries, we got it in," the trader said, pleading for anonymity after disclosing that he had overstayed temporary visas for seven years. "It was the blind leading the blind."
Word spread, and a small stream of deliverymen has come to the copy shop for similar help for about US$15 -- "black people, Chinese people, Yemeni, Egyptian," said Sanu Sheak, the shop's Bangladeshi owner.
"Everybody has a dream to come to America -- the golden dream," added Sheak, 39, who sold flowers in the street and cleaned offices at night when he first arrived in 1986. "They think that it's easy, but then they come here and find out."
No immigrant group in New York City has played the green card lottery better than Bangladeshis. They began winning their way to America in 1990, when Congress established the program, officially called the Diversity Visa Lottery, as a permanent reincarnation of smaller lotteries in 1986 and 1989.
The number of lottery green cards is small compared with the 620,000 others available yearly, but those are reserved for the close relatives of citizens and people sponsored by employers. The ostensible purpose of the lottery was to encourage ethnic diversity in the American population, but it was widely seen as a means of increasing European immigration. The lottery programs in the 1980s were dubbed "the Irish sweepstakes," because the biggest winners were immigrants from the Republic of Ireland living illegally in the US.
Intense press coverage, high levels of literacy amid poverty and large families help explain why so many Bangladeshis applied, officials say, adding that identity fraud was also a factor.
In New York, where about half the Bangladeshis in the US have settled, their numbers grew to 107,000 from 9,000 during the 1990s.
Stuart Patt, a State Department spokesman, said that so far the flow of electronic applications (through the dvlottery.state.gov) mirrors past patterns, with Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ethiopia in the lead, and more than 170 countries represented. But the official estimate of 5 million applicants by the end of the month is well below the 13 million mailed in 1999 and 2000, and even the 8.7 million sent immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. Last year, 10 million applications were received.
The lottery is open only to those from countries that have sent fewer than 50,000 people to the US in the past five years. From millions of applicants, the State Department randomly selects about 110,000 "winners," sending them invitations to apply for a visa at the closest consular office. About half fail to complete the process in time or are disqualified. The supply of diversity visas goes to the rest first-come, first served.
In the past, applications that were not selected were discarded unopened, Patt said. To improve the odds, some people applied in multiple names, and when one of their identities "won," brought in false documentation.
Digitized photographs will make such fraud far more difficult.
"We will be using facial recognition software to weed out people in multiple identities," Patt said. Another benefit, he added, is that the Internet bypasses corrupt and incompetent postal systems that sometimes dumped thousands of undelivered applications.
Bangladeshis here readily agree that the old way encouraged fraud, and some praised the new process for greater fairness.
"One per person -- this is a very good system," said Bishawjit Saha, owner of a Bangladeshi bookstore in Jackson Heights, Queens, where two college students set up shop recently to help with electronic applications.
But Saha and one of the college students also said that the ease of merging and searching such computer databases is frightening away some would-be applicants.
"A lot of people are fearful about how this is going to be used," said the student, Hamidul Hoq, who already has a green card.
Saha cited the case of an illegal immigrant grocery worker who has wavered about applying. The worker fears that if he enters identifying information online he could be giving himself up for deportation to the successors of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Department of Homeland Security.
Similar concerns reduced applications by the Irish in New York, said Siobhan Dennehy, executive director of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center in Queens.
"People are being cautious this year, more than any before," Dennehy said, noting that since Nov. 1, when this year's lottery opened, only a few hundred have showed up to apply online. Last year more than 2,500 applications forms were collected from the center.
But Patt, the State Department spokesman, said there were no plans to share the data with other agencies.
"The information is not being collected to look for people to deport," Patt said. "It's not being done as a tool for enforcement, it's being done for administrative improvement." When pressed, he added: "Would we make that information available if Homeland Security would make the request? I'm not saying we would deny it."
The Bangladeshi student, Hoq, was not reassured.
"That's my fear," he said, "they don't rule it out."
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