Fewer people are emigrating to the United States via the green card lottery. Compared with 503 successful applicants last year, 373 have been told they can apply for an immigrant visa this year.

A US Information Service spokesman said there was no record of how many people had applied for the visa from Hong Kong. He said the results were generally proportional to the number of applicants.

Some 7,280 visas are available for Asia. Although the lottery randomly selects 100,000 names from six geographic regions, only 55,000 of those get permanent resident visas.