Hi, Wish I were cruisin....

The lottery is open to Guatemalans, in fact it is heavily advertised in the local newspaper (Prensa Libre). In fact for 2007 the only countries excluded from the lottery are Mexico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador (I'm missing one) because they have exceeded their quota of 50,000 immigrants in the last 5 years. So everywhere else, the lottery is alive and kicking (and certainly is so in Guatemala).

Back in January or February, the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060123fa_fact

had a story about a Peruvian Engineer who won the lottery and is up in New Jersey somewhere. The irony of his story (and I know a few people who have had this happen) he was an engineeer with a multinational mine and had a great job, his wife wanted to come here...but since he speaks little English, he has to take classes...and certainly is not able to work as an engineer right now. I've known of a few cases where folks were professionals (lawyers, doctors) who left during the amnesty years (political reasons) and because their English was limited and obviously their degrees were not an immediate match here, they had to start from the bottom up...you guessed it, doing jobs like McDonald's, janitorial, etc...they eventually found their way around here but it puts a lot of things in context...