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).
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.
No matter how tenacious he is.