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.
Refused at the border: what the record says and how the second attempt should differ
Hypothetical example: A North Frontenac management consultant is turned around at a land border. Her offer letter described operations support at a Buffalo distribution company, and the officer concluded the role was an ordinary staff position rather than consulting. Nothing about that outcome is fatal, but the next attempt has to be different in substance, not merely tidier, because the first application is now part of her history and inconsistency is a worse problem than the original gap. The concrete decision is whether the proposed engagement can be documented as professional consulting before another application is made. Hypothetical example: a marine-operations analyst is asked to spend four days each week inside a ferry operator's dispatch office, take instructions from its manager and cover vacancies. That fact pattern may require a different route even if the contract uses the word consultant. The first review should produce a comparison of the actual control, deliverables and reporting structure with the professional category being claimed. If the substance cannot support it, change the engagement or stop; a more elaborate binder cannot repair the wrong underlying role.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What actually happened, in the officer's terms
- Fixing the substance, not the paperwork
- Where to file the second attempt, and what to disclose
He may already be a citizen: proving the status you were born with
Hypothetical example: A North Frontenac hydrologist has a permanent-resident card and a job offer from a Pennsylvania groundwater consultancy. The treaty route needs Canadian citizenship, and his card is not that. What his family has always said, and never documented, is that his mother was a Canadian citizen when he was born abroad. If that is right he may have been a Canadian citizen his whole life without holding any document that proves it, and the whole plan turns on obtaining one.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Three different statuses that people use interchangeably
- What proof looks like, and how long to allow
- What he can and cannot do while he waits
The business that runs itself is the business that fails the marginality test
Hypothetical example: A North Frontenac couple are drawn to a self-storage facility in western New York: steady revenue, one part-time attendant, almost no staff to manage. The features that make it attractive commercially are the ones that make the investor case difficult, because the enterprise must be real, active and more than marginal, and a property that collects rent with almost nobody working in it looks less like an operating business than like an investment in real estate. The decision is whether the buyers want an operating company with staffing and service obligations, or a property designed to generate owner income with limited involvement. Hypothetical example: a mobile-records-storage operator buys warehouses, adds document destruction, pickup routes and employees, but later removes the services from the business plan to reduce costs. The revised model may be commercially attractive while weakening the claim that the enterprise will become non-marginal. Before committing funds, choose the operating model honestly and make the purchase agreement, staffing plan and projections describe that same model.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What marginal actually means
- Passive holding versus an operating enterprise
- Building the argument the file needs
Describing an organization that does not exist yet without describing a fantasy
Hypothetical example: A North Frontenac maple syrup packer is opening its own facility in Vermont rather than buying one, and wants its production supervisor there as manager. In a new operation the classification's central difficulty is that the organization the manager is supposed to manage will not exist on day one. The file has to describe the organization at month twelve credibly enough to be believed and modestly enough to be achievable, because the same document is read again at extension.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The one-year approval is a promise with a due date
- The trap of the one-person company
- Premises, money and the honest fallback
Fifty-fifty partners: the structure that complicates both routes at once
Hypothetical example: Two North Frontenac partners own a rural broadband and fibre installation company in equal halves and have work waiting across the border. One of them wants to move; the other will stay and run the Ontario side. Equal ownership feels fair and is, commercially. For the two routes they are weighing, it is the single fact that makes each of them harder, and the answer depends on which document they are willing to redraft before anything is filed.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What equal shares do to the transfer route
- What equal shares do to the investor route
- Choosing by what each partner wants next
A minor child from a previous relationship, and the consent nobody asked for
Hypothetical example: A North Frontenac investor is moving her family to New Hampshire. Her fourteen-year-old son from an earlier relationship is with her most of the time under a shared parenting arrangement, and his father lives in Kingston. Her partner of nine years is not her husband. Two facts nobody has raised in the immigration conversation will decide whether the household actually moves together: a court order about the child, and a marriage certificate that does not exist.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The partner who is not a spouse
- Moving a child when another parent has rights
- The child's status, and the birthday after that
The third option: a business owner who may already qualify without paying either amount
Hypothetical example: A North Frontenac equipment-rental company has run an American branch for three years, and its owner has been comparing an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar investment with a nonrefundable gift. Both are real routes and both are expensive. Neither is the first question he should ask, because an owner who has genuinely managed a business abroad and has an American entity that has been trading for at least a year may fit an employment-based immigrant category that asks for no payment of either kind.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What the multinational manager category asks
- Why owners overlook it
- How the three compare once the category question is answered