Read it.
Use it.
Focused guides for the questions that need more than a quick answer. Each includes a worksheet to prepare your next conversation.
Guides for your next decision.
Build a TN employer evidence brief before drafting the letter
Read & prepare Applicant planningKeep an L-1A new-office record from approval to extension
Read & prepare Applicant planningCompare the E-2 evidence for a startup and a business purchase
Read & prepare U.S. destination planningCanadian RN planning for New York State
Read & prepare U.S. destination planningCanadian RN planning for California
Read & prepareSeven decisions, answered before you prepare.
The scientific technician category: two people's credentials, one employer letter
A Central Frontenac laboratory technician who tests water and soil samples for an eastern Ontario environmental firm is offered a post with a United States testing laboratory. He has a two-year technology diploma, so no listed profession fits him directly, but the Scientific Technician or Technologist category may. It is the only entry on the list that depends on somebody else's qualifications as well as the applicant's, and the employer letter has to carry both halves. The immediate decision is whether the laboratory can truthfully put a qualified chemist and a direct-support structure into the letter; if it cannot, the applicant should not treat a technical diploma as a shortcut to the category.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What the category actually asks
- Which document decides it: the employer letter
- The rest of the file, and the limits
When the permanent resident holds the job offer and the citizen holds the route
In a Central Frontenac household the husband has the American job offer and the wife has the eligibility. He is a Canadian permanent resident and a citizen of India; she is a Canadian citizen and a dietitian. TN belongs to Canadian and Mexican citizens, so his offer cannot carry the family. Reversing the plan, so that her profession leads and he accompanies, is legally clean but changes what he is allowed to do, which is the part households underestimate. Their decision is therefore economic as well as legal: they must price a period in which the offer-holder is unable to work, or defer the move while a route that attaches to him is pursued.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Why his permanent residence does not help him here
- What the dependent classification gives him, and what it withholds
- Deciding whether the reversal is worth it
Committed, promised or merely parked: the three states of an investor's money
A Central Frontenac couple who have managed a farm-supply outlet are buying a feed and agricultural supply store in northern New York. They have the price agreed and the money available, and they still risk a refusal, because the requirement is not that funds exist but that they are irrevocably committed and at risk in the enterprise. Money in three different places on application day is treated three different ways, and the file should say which is which. The decision for the buyers is whether they can accept commercial obligations that survive a refusal, because that exposure—not merely the amount in the account—is what demonstrates the required commitment.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The money that counts on the day
- Escrow, and how to write it so it still counts
- Working capital that is not just a cushion
Who owns the American company decides whether anyone can transfer to it
Three siblings own an eastern Ontario maker of livestock handling equipment in equal shares, and a Central Frontenac sibling is to run a new Iowa operation. They incorporate the American company quickly, in their own names, because it was easier than a share subscription. That decision, made by a general practitioner in an afternoon, can defeat the L-1 petition before anyone reaches the questions about premises or duties, because the classification depends on a relationship between two companies. The first decision is structural: will the foreign company own the U.S. entity, or will the same owners hold both in matching control proportions? Premises and hiring evidence come after that answer is documented.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The relationship the classification requires
- What to file, and what quietly goes missing
- Get the structure right before the lease, not after
A veterinarian who owns the practice: why the professional route is the one she cannot use
A Central Frontenac veterinarian owns a mixed-animal practice outright and wants to buy a Vermont clinic whose owner is retiring. Veterinarian is a listed profession, so she assumes the professional route is the simple one. It is the route her ownership closes. Between the two remaining options the deciding question is not which is cheaper but what she will spend her days doing once she is there. She must choose the route that matches her expected workday: managing a related-company expansion may support a transfer, while personally developing and directing her own purchase points toward the investor route, subject to its separate conditions.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Why the listed profession does not help an owner
- The transfer route, and the duties test it turns on
- The investor route, and what it asks in return
One engineer's status, four different family answers
A Central Frontenac electrical engineer accepts a professional post in Ohio. His wife teaches at a local elementary school, one child is twelve, another is twenty and studying in Kingston, and a baby is due after the move. He assumes the family follows him. They do, but each of the four gets a different answer, and two of those answers have deadlines attached that nobody in the household has written down. The family should make a separate status and work plan for each person, with age-out and licensing dates on one calendar, instead of assuming the principal's approval answers every household question.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The spouse who is a teacher but not a listed one
- The twenty-year-old, and the clock nobody wrote down
- The twelve-year-old and the baby born in Ohio
Raising the money is the comparison: registered accounts, a cottage and a nonrefundable gift
A Central Frontenac couple in their early sixties have no business to sell. Their wealth is a paid-off home, a second family property and registered retirement accounts. Comparing the investor route with the Gold Card, they focus on the headline amounts and miss the question that actually decides it for them: what it costs, in tax and in permanence, to turn what they own into the currency each route demands. The decision is whether the household can document and risk investment capital while meeting job requirements, or instead make a nonreturnable payment by each applicant to the U.S. government after confirming eligibility under the announced Gold Card framework.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What each route wants, in cash, on a date
- The tax cost of raising it, which neither program mentions
- Reversibility, and what that is worth at sixty-two