I think you overestimate the straight-forwardness of this. Option #2 means including economic incentives in your relationship ("I better rush towards marrying someone, lest I get kicked out!"). Option #3 is very restricted -- if you are on a non-immigrant visa (e.g. student visa), then the simple fact of applying for the lottery (and thus signalling immigration intent) will likely make you ineligible for a renewal.
But you see, that's it. Those are the options. Option #4: treat people who want to immigrate with decency, isn't available.
I think it's fair to complain that this option doesn't exist, I'd like it to exist. But it doesn't and options #1-3 are what the author had to work within, yet chose not to pursue any of them.
If he still wants to get in, once he's back in New Zealand, he's free to continue pursuing permanent residency. Going back to New Zealand doesn't prevent him from continuing to pursue these options. But he simply doesn't have the tenacity to do it, not while he was in the U.S. and probably not once he returns home.
Obviously, you can overcome any legal hurdle with "tenacity".
Lottery is out if he intended to stay. I am wondering if you are a troll for even having suggested it. It is meant for people outside the US - with no intent of ever visiting. It signals immigration intent, so even tourist visas can be denied on that alone. It is a lottery, not an application. Very low odds that would actually make it harder for him to stay in the country. He seems to have a couple of brain cells, so he didn't go for that.
Marrying may not be an option, or maybe not yet. He may not want to, he may not have found someone he truly wants to marry (and doing it for the sole purpose of getting a visa is fraud), he may not even like women. I don't know why he didn't, and you don't either.
Getting a job that will want to sponsor a visa only really works if the demand is truly ridiculous to justify it - such as computer science or engineering. Changing what appears to be a successful law carreer for another in, say, computer science is not really an option without leaving the US, which the author did not want to do in the first place.
So, once he's back in New Zealand, what are his options? Other than the lottery, which is a lottery, not a guarantee. There are a few avenues he could try, but I can think of none that don't have the risk of rebuilding his whole life and getting deported a few years later, once again.
Participating in lotter does not signal immigration intent. I participated in lottery for my parents for ten years and they had zero problem renewing their visitor visas every two year. It's pretty well documented that it's ok to do lottery without while on visitor or student visa.
The fact that none of his employers wanted to sponsor him for visa tells you how valuable he was to those employers. Full in cost of employment-based greencard is only 5k-10k including legal fees. All company has to do is to provide financial information and to sign several forms - everything else is done by outside lawyers. I could not imagine any company refusing to do it for any professional employee unless he was extremely replaceable.
> Participating in lotter does not signal immigration intent
Can you back this up? It is open to interpretation as far as I know.
US immigration assumes you intend to immigrate by default. It's up to you to prove that you have no interest in doing so. It gets harder to claim that you have no intention when you are, in fact, participating in the lottery, so you want to immigrate after all.
Perhaps your parents had enough ties to their home country that it didn't matter.
Lottery is fine. I had H1s and then E3 visas for a while until I won the DV lottery. OP, as a NZ citizen, has a relatively high chance of winning (approx 1 in 20 last time I looked).
It seems you're contradicting yourself. You say "I think it's fair to complain that this option doesn't exist, I'd like it to exist." But then you go on to disparage the author for doing just that.
You can't simultaneously say that it's fair to complain and argue that people are "just complaining". Or is it only fair for people not affected by these laws, who have no incentive to complain, to do so?
It's fair to complain that a better option doesn't exist. It's not fair to take no action given the existing options and then complain the system was unfair and against you.
The author had choices available, but chose not to avail himself of any of them, then wants sympathy for not pursuing. Immigration was simply not as important to him as other things, and those are the choices he made. I don't feel any particular sympathy for him having to suffer from the consequence of those choices.
I wish he had better options available to him, but he didn't, so he didn't even bother trying.
I kind of see what your point is, but I disagree. A person's right to point out flaws in a system should not be contingent upon having overcome those flaws. I see that it would be easy to feel more sympathy for the author if he had fought tooth and nail against the system and still come out on the losing end, but that is really a completely separate topic from whether his arguments about the system itself are justified or not. The weight of the arguments should not depend on who is making them, they should stand for themselves.
Your reasoning sounds to me a bit like the (common) argument that a bicyclist that is injured by a car and then complains that the roads aren't accommodating bicycles shouldn't be taken seriously because he didn't wear a helmet, and everyone knows that bicycling is dangerous. Whether or not he should wear a helmet as a precaution doesn't change the fact that bicyclists have a basic right to argue that they should not be subject to this risk.
Applying for the green card lottery does nothing to hurt any current or future visa applications you make. Visas with a nonimmigrant intent will ask questions like:
"Do you have a current I-485 application in process?"
"Have you previously applied for an I-485?"
"Have you been rejected for an I-485?"
For those that don't know, an I-485 is an AoS (adjustment of status) application.
You can truthfully answer "no" to all of these questions because an I-485 is something very specific and entering the DV lottery is not that.
So you have to be really careful about what is said (eg nonimmigrant intent for a visa) and what are the actual rules. If the form simply asks about I-485 applications, you can truthfully answer "no" even if you want to stay here forever.
By the time you get to filing an I-485 you're basically done with a PR application. You're just waiting for it to come through. It may take 6 months or 12 months but it won't randomly take years (like a Labor Certification can).
Now as far as work visas go, the H1B allows an immigrant intent so none of this is an issue.
For visas that don't (eg Canadian TN, Australian E3), even there the rules are murky. USCIS says that, for example, filing an I-485 shows immigrant intent but they've also issued a ruling saying that filing an I-485 can't solely be used to deny a renewal or the issuing of those visas. So what does that mean in practice? Well, nobody really knows.
That too is a problem.
But I digress...
My main point is you are 100% incorrect when you say applying for the DV lottery impacts your ability to apply for a nonimmigrant visa in any way. It does not.
None of the forms I filled in asked about I-485, they asked "Has anyone ever filed an immigration petition on your behalf?", which I had to answer yes to because my aunt at one point started sponsoring my mom for a sibling green card - even though that application was filed before I was born, and was abandoned decades ago.
