Xcountrymove

The annual Green Card Lottery program makes permanent residence visas available to people who meet certain requirements. Applicants for Diversity Visas are chosen by a computer-generated random lottery drawing. The Green Cards, however, are distributed among six geographic regions. The most visas go to regions with lower rates of immigration while no green cards are issued to citizens of countries that have sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the last five years. Within each geographic region, no single country can receive more than 7% of the available Green Cards for any given year.

For the 2006 Green Card Lotary, the following Countries were not allowed to participate (most of these are no-brainers):

Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam.

The nice thing about this Green Card Lotary is the fact that it is free. You can apply at the official Diversity Lottery site, however, applications for 2006 are no longer being accepted.

From what I have read there are only 2 real requirements in order to participate in the Green Card Lotary. The first is that you come from a qualifying country and second is that meet either the education or training requirement. For the education requirement the person applying must have either a high school education or its equivalent. If you want to participate in the Green Card Lotary but you cannot meet the education requirment, you can apply using the training requirement. This calls for the person to have at least two years of work experience within an occupation that requires at least two years of training or experience in order to perform the job (this is a little confusing if you ask me). The U.S. Department of Labor's O*Net database is used to determine qualifying work experience.