The deputy to the Consul General of the United States Embassy to Romania, Sonya Tsiros, answered HotNews.ro readers's questions about US visas applied to Romanian citizens in a live Q&A session on Wednesday.

Romanians can submit applications for the Diversity Visa 2010 program - the so-called lottery visas - by which the United States provides 50,000 permanent residence visas to citizens from various countries. Applications are made exclusively online and applicants fulfilling the selection criteria will attend a computer-assisted lottery.

Asked about when an applicant for a US visa is informed about the reasons the applications is rejected - a issue largely debated in Romania - Sonya Tsiros said that once rejected, an applicant would receive a written explanations regarding the legislation based on which the rejection was decided. She said a consular officer must use general terms in discussing the reasons of the rejection.She said a Romanian citizen with a ten-year visa on her old passport but who renewed her passport could travel to the US with both the old passport with a valid visa and the new passport as long as the visa was not damaged and is still valid, and the name was not changed.She said that in case of an applicant who applied unsuccessfully for the visa lottery and then submitted an application for a tourist visa, it might be difficult to prove his current intentions as a tourist as long as the application for the lottery visa was recent and was rejected because he did not met the criteria to qualify. But chances would not be affected for a tourist visa as long as the lottery visa application is old and he has a stable situation in Romania.She said that in the case of a Romanian who has permanent residence in Germany, he should apply to the US consulate or embassy to the region he lives in. If he lives in Germany temporarily, he ma