Winning The US Lottery & Losing Faith In American Dream

QUEENS, N.Y.—Sunita K., a petite, 46-year-
old woman with freckled skin, peeked
through the door of a 7-Eleven in Queens,
trying to catch a glimpse of the person
behind the billing counter. She was
searching for Indian faces, confused by
similar brown-skinned Hispanic ones. A
Nepalese immigrant, Sunita speaks only a
few words of English and was hoping to
find a benevolent Hindi-speaking Indian to
give her a job. Any job.
“I felt defeated,” she says in scarcely
coherent Hindi, her first and only language
being Nepalese. In the two years that
Sunita* and her family have spent in the
United States, they have been sucked into a
vicious cycle of isolation, unemployment,
illness and shattered dreams. “We were
supposed to be lucky to be in America, but
this has been the worst time of my life.”
Sunita was one of the 50,000 winners of the
2008 “Green Card” lottery. Officially called
the Diversity Visa lottery, it is offered by the
U.S. State Department in countries with low
rates of immigration to the United States.
Winners, chosen through a random
computer-generated lottery, are given
permanent resident visas to live, work and
study in the U.S. Each year, more than 10
million people apply; like Sunita, 70 percent
of the winners come from developing
countries in Africa and Asia.
But without any assistance, family or
guidance in a new country, many find
themselves unprepared to start their lives
from scratch.
When he applied for the lottery, Sunita’s
husband, 48-year-old Bijay, had worked for
20 years as a civil irrigation engineer for the
Nepalese government. He had a
comfortable job, the perks of government
employment and a settled life, but was
persuaded by his 18-year-old son’s desire
to study computer engineering in the U.S.
and his own wish to be among the “lucky”
Nepalese to win the “golden opportunity to
go to America.”
Three months later, the consular officer at
the U.S. embassy in Kathmandu shook his
hand and said heartily, “Welcome to
America.” The K. family had won the Green
Card lottery.
In preparation for their new life, Bijay
mortgaged the family home to raise 1
million Nepalese rupees, roughly $14,000.
The family paid around $700 each for the
lottery fee, spent $4,500 on three one-way
air tickets, and set aside the rest to cover
their initial expenses in the U.S.
Lottery winners are unique in their lack of a
support system. Unlike immigrants who are
“sponsored” by families or employers
based in the U.S., those with diversity
lottery visas often don’t have a family or
job waiting for them. Nor do they have
avenues for help or information— the State
Department does not offer orientation
sessions or programs to integrate them
into mainstream American society. A
booklet, “Welcome to the United States: A
Guide for New Immigrants,” published by
the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services office, is available in 17 languages.
But immigrants are seldom aware of even
this rudimentary resource.
Sunita and her family certainly weren’t.
They first arrived at the home of a friend of
a friend in Springfield, Maryland, where
they rented a two-bedroom apartment for $
1,000 a month. But they quickly realized
that Bijay's engineering degree from Nepal
would not get him a job in the U.S., unless
he supplemented it with a six-month
American diploma. Nepalese neighbors and
acquaintances told the family to apply for
jobs in stores like Wal-Mart and Home
Depot, just to pay the bills till they found
better work. But Sunita and Bijay were
turned down there, too. Without
references, they couldn’t get jobs.
“This is the plight of most people who come
to the U.S. on DV lottery,” says Narbada
Chhetri, a senior community organizer at a
New York–based Nepalese not-for-profit,
Adhikaar. “They are normally educated
Nepalese, but when they come here, they
become cheap labor for local businesses.
They are desperate and willing to work very
hard for very little money.”
Unlike other visas, the Diversity Visa
requires applicants to have a high school
education or at least two years of work
experience. A 2008 report by the Migration
Policy Institute, called “Uneven Progress,”
said lottery winners were the second-
largest group of legal immigrants, after
refugees and asylees, to suffer significant
occupational downgrading in the U.S.
Immigrants with college, even masters’
degrees, are employed as babysitters,
domestic help, cab drivers and waiters.
Upwardly Global, a New York–based
organization, helps foreign-trained
immigrants to develop job search
techniques, craft U.S. style resumes, and
hone interview skills. A third of their clients
are lottery winners, says Nikki Cicerani, the
executive director.
Job-hunting is only a part of the problem
though. The K. family was uninformed
about many aspects of living and working
in the U.S: What is a Social Security
number? How does health insurance work?
How could they get proof of permanent
address?
Sunita spent her days worrying and her
nights crying. Chronic anxiety and
haphazard meal times led to her
developing severe gastric problems, and
the cold weather stirred Bijay’s asthma
from hibernation.
Broken, the family decided to start over
and moved to a crammed, one-bedroom
basement apartment in Annandale,
Virginia. Their son, Sunil, landed a job as a
waiter at an Indian restaurant, where he
worked 12 hours a day and returned home
so tired, Sunita recalls, he couldn’t even
bend to remove his shoes.
“In Nepal, my boy had never so much as
lifted a cup of tea,” she says, tears
springing to her eyes.

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