Why America excluded Nigerians from 2023 visa lottery

The United States has excluded Nigeria from its 2023 Diversity Immigrant Visa programme which is also known as the green card lottery.

Nigeria’s exclusion from the programme makes it eight years in a row that the US ignored the most populous African country in the world among immigrants entering via DVL.

The programme is a government lottery program offering the chance to applicants from Africa and other continents of getting the United States Permanent Resident Card.

About 55,000 persons apply for visas to enter the US through Diversity Visa Lottery (DVL), but the US in this year’s programme stated that over 50,000 citizens from Nigeria have relocated to the world’s largest economy for greener pastures in the last five years.

According to the instructions in the 2023 DV programme, Nigeria is the only African country not included to participate this year.

It says, “For DV-2023, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply because more than 50,000 natives of these countries immigrated to the United States in the previous five years.

“Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China (including Hong Kong SAR), Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, Venezuela and Vietnam. Natives of Macau SAR and Taiwan are not eligible.”

It emphasises that “more than 50,000 natives of these countries immigrated to the United States in the previous five years.”

According to Name Census, the total number of Nigerians living in the US is 382,820. The data reveals that the total Nigerian population between 2015 and 2020 increased by 116,847 people, per Nigeria Abroad.

It shows further that New York City has the most significant Black immigrant population of any metropolitan area in the United States, totalling about 1.1 million persons in 2019.

Miami and Washington DC are second and third areas sheltering a total number of 490,000 and 260,000 Black migrants respectively.