As you may know, one of the ways of legal immigration to the United States is a lottery visa or racial diversity visa program. In this program, every year, a number of winners are introduced by the Kentucky Consular Center, KCC, from all over the world. The winners would be declared qualified to receive this kind of visa through interviews. In 2022, 5,739 cases from Iran were announced as winners in the DV program, which is the highest number in the Asian continent. Since the United State of America does not have an embassy in Iran, Iranian winners have to travel to one of the following three countries for interviews, Turkey (Ankara), United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi) and Armenia (Yervan). However Iranian winners have faced much discrimination from these three embassies. Moreover, during the past three years, the world was struggling with the corona pandemic. Therefore, none of these three embassies were active in the first three months of this fiscal year.  

It should be noted that the racial diversity visa has a one-year time frame from October first 2021 to September 30th 2022. However, the official activity of these three embassies began in January 2022, and due to the restrictions of the coronavirus, very few numbers were issued every month.  

Unfortunately, after 4 months, the US embassy in Ankara suddenly stopped scheduling interview appointments for the Iranian cases until today. While the second Asian country that has the largest number of winners after Iran, Nepal, has invited most of the winners to interview only in a day. Although according to the primary acceptance letter sent to the all winners it is noted that selection for participation in the DV Program is not a guarantee of a visa, they didn’t clarify that it is also not a guarantee for a visa interview.

The case numbers of Iranians in Asia are scattered in a range between 1 and 12,000. However, the Ankara embassy only processed case numbers up to 6,000 during its 4 months of operation. The rest of the cases were left without any further progression. This caused enormous disappointment among the Iranian winners.

We wondered why Iranian people who have the highest number of acceptances in the Asia continent are facing the lowest number of invitations for interviews from these embassies.

I hope you understand the individuals and families who have held hopes up for this groundbreaking event and have been preparing themselves for a new life. We all do believe in American justice.

During this time, we have tried all ways to find a solution for our issue, including sending multiple emails to KCC, having phone contacts with the Ankara embassy, using Twitter platform to show our peaceful demand but unfortunately none of them reached a suitable answer or a proper result.

Since our deadline is approaching, we, a large group of 2022 lottery winners, who chose the US embassy in Ankara, kindly demand you to convey our appeal to the Kentucky Consular Center.

We really hope that with this letter, we could have a chance for being Scheduled in the remaining time. It would be a great honor if you could help us with this issue.

Iranian DV 2022 lottery winners