Indians Out of US Green Card Lottery Till ’29

Hyderabad: India will remain ineligible for the United States Diversity Visa (DV) lottery, popularly known as the Green Card Lottery, at least until 2029. The country’s high immigration volume to the US continues to exceed the eligibility threshold, while backlogs in H-1B and employment-based (EB) visas have made permanent residency increasingly difficult for Indian applicants.

The Diversity Visa programme promotes immigration from countries that have sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants to the US over the past five years. India has consistently exceeded this cap, with more than 60,000 immigrants annually, automatically disqualifying it from the lottery.

In 2022 alone, India sent 1,27,010 immigrants to the US—more than the total number from South America (99,030), Africa (89,570), or Europe (75,610). Based on cumulative data from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), India will remain ineligible for DV lotteries through 2027, 2028, and 2029.

Several other countries, including China, South Korea, Canada and Pakistan, are also ineligible for the upcoming DV-2026 lottery. For countries that qualify, the latest visa allocations were announced on Wednesday.

With the lottery route closed, Indian immigrants are left with limited paths to a green card—chiefly converting an H-1B work visa to permanent residency, applying through family sponsorship, investment-based immigration, or asylum. But each of these avenues is narrowing.

“The government itself seems unsure about future H-1B rules,” said Rajeshwar Rao, who runs an immigration consultancy in Hyderabad. “Officials claim the final policy will be out in February 2026, but there’s no clarity. This confusion has left both applicants and employers anxious.”

The employment-based route, classified under EB visas, remains the most common but is plagued by years of backlog. These categories include EB-1 (extraordinary ability), EB-2 (advanced degree), EB-3 (skilled workers), EB-4 (religious and government employees), and EB-5 (investors). For Indian applicants, EB-2 and EB-3 visas are retrogressed to December 1, 2013, and August 15, 2014, respectively, meaning only those who applied before these dates are currently being processed.

The asylum route offers little relief, with an estimated 14,46,908 pending cases before the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as of December 2024. On average, asylum seekers wait over 1,200 days for their cases to be resolved.

With every existing channel tightening and the DV lottery closed for years to come, millions of Indian professionals and students in the US now face an uncertain path to permanent residency.

Number of Indian immigrants obtaining lawful permanent resident status in the US.

(Source: US department of homeland security)

2014       77,910

2015       64,120

2016       64,690

2017       60,390

2018       59,820

2019       54,500

2020       46,360

2021       93,450

2022       1,27,010

2023       78,070