I've been told by attorneys that applying for the Green Card lottery does not come without risk--in fact it can prevent you from obtaining a non-immigrant visa.
For example, when applying for an F or J visa (student/post-doc, say) the consular officer will ask you if you have intent to emigrate. The only allowed answer is a firm "No and I have permanent connections to my home country."
If you've applied for the green card lottery in the past, the consular officer could interpret this as having intent to emigrate and then deny you on any other non dual-intent visas.
IANAL, so take it with a grain of salt. This is a super conservative interpretation though. Anecdotally, I myself have received an F-1 visa despite having applied for diversity lottery (unsuccessfully). If I recall correctly, I may have at some point seen an explicit guidance on the DoS website to the effect that a mere DV lottery application (without a successful followup petition) is not necessarily indicative of immigrant intent for non-immigrant visa application purposes. I cannot find it though, the page seems to be 404ing.
Here are the odds, by country. Rate of legal immigration doesn't seem to be a primary determinate for that country's odds. www.usagreencardlottery.org/green-card-statistics.jsp
Slight nit: you want to add http to that so it gets linkified.
Thanks for posting it. It's super-interesting. I always suspected the chance for my country (Australia) was _reasonably_ good. This bears that out. In fact it might even be higher (5%) than I'd expected.
That being said I tried like 6-8 times and never won. But that's not too surprising even at 1 in 20.
In fact I think I've only ever met one person who had won this. As it happened he was from Russia.
Not a lawyer, eligibility is based upon being born in a country with low immigration to the US. I neither Canada nor Mexico qualify although I can't find the exact list right now.
You go in the Pakistani queue. One of my friend who is an Indian citizen can apply because he was born in Kuwait while folks who were born in India cannot apply.
If you're married to an Australian (non-Pakistani), you can "cross-charge" your GC application to your spouse. This is true for employer-based GC, may apply to diversity visa as well.
I believe one of the reason for having that rule is to prevent people buying citizenship of some poor country and then use that to apply for the lottery.
Selecting by country of birth prevents those shenanigans.
I tried once about 15 years ago and didn't succeed. I can imagine the pool of applicants is even larger these days, if it can be done via the internet.
A decade+ ago I won the lottery on my third year trying. I got the winning notice the same month I got the Canadian immigrant visa (obtained as Skilled Worker) stamped in my passport. We chose to go to Vancouver.
I don't know about survivor bias but I think the movies were right. The odds are ever in you favor, and you can't see past the choices you don't understand ;)
The odds are kinda small and there are restrictions but I know at least three people who got their green card this way.