That's what I thought as well, until I did some calculations based on the statistics.

There is a scaled percentage of winning, which pretty much puts every participant from an eligible country at a 0.X to 1.X% chance of winning. Malaysia has roughly 6000-7000 applicants a year (excluding dependents) and only 70-80 might win. Based on the previous year trends, the number of Malaysians winning each year seems to be going down. Meanwhile, in the 2013 lottery, 6029 Iranians won the lottery out of 369,118 Iranian applicants. That is 1.6%. I hope this gives you the general idea of what is going on.

Countries that have had over 50,000 selected entrants in the past 5 years are not eligible to apply for the DV lottery. These countries are called "high admission countries", and as you could probably guess, such countries include Mainland China, Bangladesh, India, Philippines, and Nigeria.

That is a LOT of questions.. damn, I'm not sure how to answer all of it. Haha. I'll try. I love being in (some parts of) the US! I've never faced discrimination before, a couple of incidents did come close, though. You can just look up how those cities look like on Google, but San Antonio has a beautiful historical downtown river walk and there's a couple of nice spots in Houston. But otherwise, they're just plain suburbs - boring, grid-like and consistent. Just like Damansara/PJ, I guess. There are a million reasons, big and small; on why I don't want to return to Malaysia, but I can go on and on about it that will span the length of several mamak hangout sessions. Most of them are purely materialistic and superficial, and this includes but are not limited to: the ability to own a bunch of kickass cars and such low prices, the fact that I have 2-day free Amazon Prime shipping, Netflix, cheap stuff, Netflix, beautiful national parks, great food, the Second Amendment, and did I mention Netflix?

If you really want to know, we can chat privately about the other reasons, because I don't want to spew out too much irrelevant stuff in an Education Essentials subforum.

Yup, Houston is definitely the mecca of the energy industry here in the Western hemisphere. My dad's here, in the oil and gas industry. So is my aunt, who lives a mile away from our house. I've met a Malaysian girl who's also working in the oil and gas industry here. And I found out that a Malaysian Boilermaker I met earlier this year at the Malaysian Midwest Games at IUB lived in Houston up until recently, as his mother was working in, you guessed it, the oil and gas industry.

You can apply, but the chances of you winning it are really small. It hasn't really changed much over the years.