Green Card Applicants

Question:

Why don't you post information about what basis your friend would use to apply? Does he have a job offer from the US that requires a college degree? Or does he have a spouse, parents, children over 21, or brothers or sisters in the US? These are essentially the only options for immigration.

Answer:

First, it's not true that people from India cannot apply for Green Cards.

True is that anybody who applies for a Green Card must have some kind of basis for it - either a job or a very close family relationship, or winning the visa lottery. In all these cases, you can assume that it will take several years until a Green Card would become available if he started the process today.

Also true is that being born in India (note that I'm saying "being born" rather than "being a citizen" - you are right in that normally only the country of birth counts for immigration purposes) does have immigration effects; the same type of immigrant visa takes longer for countries that send large numbers of immigrants to the US - India, China, Mexico, the Philippines. The system to determine this is pretty complicated.

Now for the really good news: your friend will qualify as being from the UAE. As a matter of fact, most likely he could not even apply as Indian even if he wanted to. The UAE does not send many immigrants to the US, so he won't have more hurdles than other immigrants.

He would also qualify to participate in the visa lottery (India does not qualify, but the UAE do), if he has at least a high school diploma.

I am not sure if being an UAE resident he will qualify for visa lottery, since he is an Indian citizen. I remember having read somewhere that it is the citizenship that matters. YOu must check this up

Read up on the Dept. of State lottery information page (it's probably down right now, but should be available probably around August).

That describes it in detail.

Generally, all US immigration is determined by the country of birth. Or, more precisely, by the country that the place of birth is in today (for instance, Russia, not Soviet Union). This really does apply to the lottery, too, but feel free to double-check it.

I assume that the reason for this regulation was dual citizenship and the practice of some countries to sell their citizenship. If citizenship was the criteria, somebody could just by a passport from Belize and participate in the lottery.

There are a few exceptions to the rule of using your birth place. Everybody can always use the birth place. Some people get to chose another country. This is known as alternate chargeability.

This happens under one of two circumstances:

- if you are married to somebody born in another country, you can opt to use your spouse's country instead of your own.

- if both of your parents were neither a citizen nor a resident in your country of birth at the time of you were born, you can use one parent's country of birth (or citizenship - I'm not sure here).

This is taken from the instructions for DV-2001: "To enter, an applicant must be able to claim nativity in an eligible country, and must meet either the education or training requirement of the DV program. Nativity in most cases is determined by the applicant's place of birth. However, if a person was born in an ineligible country but his/her spouse was born in an eligible country, such person can claim the spouse's country of birth rather than his/her own. Also, if a person was born in an ineligible country, but neither of his/her parents was born there or resided there at the time of the birth, such person may be able to claim nativity in one of the parents' country of birth."

And from the DV-2001 FAQ: "Native ordinarily means someone born within a particular country, regardless of the individual's current country of residence or nationality."

A person born and raised in the UAE would be eligible for the lottery, regardless of his Indian citizenship.