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.
Describe a forester’s mixed field and professional assignment
Explain the professional responsibility without hiding routine work or assuming the worksite determines classification.
Identify what the applicant evaluates, which conclusions are developed and how field information supports them. Attribute other crew members’ work accurately. A professional title should not conceal a materially different assignment, and field activity should not be treated as automatically outside professional work.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Map the assessment and recommendation work
- Identify the listed credential
- Keep the engagement current
Check citizenship before planning a seasonal TN assignment
A temporary project and Canadian residence do not remove TN’s citizenship requirement.
TN is available to Canadian or Mexican citizens, not every Canadian permanent resident. Use the applicant’s actual citizenship documents before relying on a professional licence or a short U.S. engagement. Neither fact supplies citizenship by implication.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Identify the actual nationality
- Check profession and procedure independently
- Do not apply the principal’s assumptions to the family
Read an E-2 collateral change on its actual effective date
A promised release of enterprise security should be distinguished from an effective change and from the remaining investment requirements.
Security over a business rarely lives in one document. Read the promissory note, the general security agreement, any guarantee, any subordination or intercreditor arrangement and every executed amendment together, because a term struck out in one instrument is often reinstated by another. Then identify precisely which borrowing funded which part of the investment: an owner who drew on three facilities across two lenders cannot answer the question with a single account balance. Match each advance to the account it landed in and to what it paid for. Be exact about the difference between a lender's letter saying it will discharge its registration and a discharge that has actually been registered. A personal guarantee is a common source of confusion here, because it tells you the owner is personally exposed but says nothing about whether the lender also holds a charge over inventory, receivables or equipment. Confirm the registered position rather than inferring it from the guarantee.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Collect the complete security arrangement
- Apply the borrowing distinction
- Reconcile the funding with the business
Check a promoted employee’s foreign year before a new-office L-1A plan
The ordinary foreign-role rule and the new-office L-1A rule need to be kept distinct when a promotion occurred during the employment record.
A promotion partway through the employment history creates a specific problem, and it cannot be answered until the American entity's stage is fixed. Where the entity has been doing business in the United States for less than a year, the new-office branch applies, and doing business means the regular, systematic and continuous supply of goods or services rather than the existence of a company on a register. Incorporation, a registered office and a dormant bank account do not establish trading. Fix that point first, because it determines whether a period of specialized-knowledge work abroad can be relied on at all in a proposal for a managerial or executive American role. Settle the date the entity actually began operating, evidence it with invoices, payroll, contracts or filings, and only then map the promotion against it.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Identify the actual office stage
- Apply the specific L-1A requirement
- Keep ordinary and L-1B cases accurate
Compare a promoted employee’s transfer with a loan-funded investment
The same applicant can have different unresolved facts under L-1 and E-2; neither history should be reshaped to suit a preferred category.
Where one applicant has both an employment history and a funding history, each has to be tested on its own terms, and neither can be reshaped to rescue the other. The transfer route asks for a qualifying relationship between the entities as parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate, for both to be doing business regularly and continuously in the United States and in at least one other country, and for one continuous year of full-time qualifying employment abroad within the preceding three years. In an ordinary transfer that year may have been managerial, executive or specialized-knowledge work, while the American role must meet the category requested; days worked inside the United States do not count toward the year, although short visits do not automatically break continuity. Then fix the American entity's stage, because a new office pursuing a managerial or executive role needs the foreign year to have been managerial or executive work specifically. A promotion, a secondment or a completed training programme does not substitute for the required employment period.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- For L-1, preserve the foreign-role chronology
- For E-2, preserve the financing history
- Compare the next real dependency
Plan household income during a temporary assignment
One assignment, one proposed job and one study plan are three separate questions about permission, and answering the first tells you nothing about the other two. Test each person against the category they will actually hold.
Before a household budget is built on it, list every activity that is expected to produce income and say who performs it and where. Include the short and seasonal ones, because a six-week contract, a summer position or a few days of consulting for a former employer raise the same authorization question as a permanent job; brevity is not an exemption. Include work that would be performed remotely for a client outside the United States, and note it as a question to resolve rather than assuming it falls outside the analysis. Then split the list in two. On one side goes income the household could lawfully receive after arrival on the status each person will actually hold. On the other goes income that is merely possible, or that depends on a document nobody has yet applied for. Planning from the second list is how families arrive committed to rent that only the first list can cover.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Identify the proposed income sources
- Match each person to their own permission
- Keep immigrant plans on their own timeline
Compare EB-5 policy participation with a Gold Card budget
An enterprise governance role and a government gift should not be described as interchangeable investments.
Identify which decisions the investor can participate in and the actual governing provisions. EB-5 participation can be through day-to-day managerial control or policy formulation; do not invent an operating job when the proposal relies on policy rights. Read the exit provisions in the same agreement. A contractual repayment entitlement or guaranteed rate of return is excluded. The narrow exception for an option exercisable solely by the enterprise requires petition withdrawal on exercise unless sustainment and the other statutory requirements have been fulfilled. A marketing description should not displace those operative terms.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Read the enterprise agreement before naming the EB-5 role
- Build a capital-and-jobs record independent of the role title
- Keep the Gold Card government amounts out of an unexplained Canadian total
- Record the event that controls the next action