IN THIS GUIDE · The Michigan business is thirty years old and the company buying it is three weeks old: why this transfer is treated as a new office
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
New entity, established operation: how the petition is framed
Where the United States employer has been doing business for less than a year, the petition is treated as a new office, approved for an initial period not exceeding one year and extended only on evidence of what actually happened. The acquisition helps enormously with that evidence, because the subsidiary inherits premises, equipment, customers and staff rather than projecting them, and the file can show real payroll from the first month. Present it that way deliberately: the asset purchase agreement, the assumed leases, the transferred customer contracts and the retained employees, followed by a staffing and financial plan for the first year that builds on what was bought rather than inventing a future.
The duties test, applied to a working general manager
The classification asks whether the transferee will be employed primarily in a managerial or executive capacity, which means directing the organization or a function of it, supervising professional or supervisory staff or managing an essential function, exercising discretion over day-to-day operations, and setting goals and policies. It does not require that he never touch a bottling line. It does require that his primary time go to management, and a petition should say how the time divides, who reports to him, what he decides without asking anyone, and which budgets he controls. A retained supervisor and a small inherited staff make that description credible; a plan in which he personally runs the line six days a week does not.
The year abroad and the qualifying relationship, proved separately
Two facts are often assumed and rarely evidenced properly. First, the transferee must have one continuous year of full-time employment with the qualifying organization within the three years before the petition, proved with payroll records and a human-resources letter, not with a job title. Second, the Ontario parent must own or control the Michigan subsidiary, proved with share registers, subscription documents and evidence that the money for the shares moved. Both entities must be actively doing business, which the acquisition makes easy to show on the American side and which the Ontario company demonstrates with its own accounts and contracts.
What the first year has to produce
An initial approval for a new office is short, and the extension is decided on results measured against the plan. That makes the plan a commitment rather than a brochure. If the file promises four new hires, a second shift and a named list of customers retained after closing, the extension application should be able to show what happened to each of those, including honest explanations where something did not. The classification also has an outer limit of seven years for managers and executives, and no automatic conversion to permanent residence, so a household should decide early whether the American move is a posting or an emigration, because the routes diverge long before year seven.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.
- USCIS — L-1A intracompany transferee executive or manager
- USCIS Policy Manual — L-1 evidence (Vol. 2, Part L, Ch. 8)
- 8 CFR 214.2(l) — intracompany transferees
- 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(44) — managerial and executive capacity
- USCIS Policy Manual — employment authorization for certain spouses
- USCIS — fee schedule (G-1055)