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.
A consultant's TN survives a change of scope only if the paperwork changes with it
Hypothetical example: Fenella advises food processors and small manufacturers from a practice she runs in Powassan, without a business degree but with eleven years of work in the field. An American processor has engaged her to redesign its production planning. Management Consultant is a listed profession reachable through experience as well as through a degree, but the engagement has already been extended twice, and each extension has quietly moved the arrangement closer to something TN does not permit.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The experience branch is available, and it must be documented as carefully as a degree
- What changes when the engagement is extended
- The trap: consulting that becomes self-employment in the United States
A permanent resident's most expensive mistake is assuming the border sees a Canadian
Hypothetical example: Joon-ho is a Korean citizen holding Canadian permanent residence and works as a maintenance electrician at a Powassan plant. An American manufacturer would like to hire him. He has lived and worked lawfully in Canada for nine years and assumes that gives him what a Canadian colleague has at the border. It does not, and the assumption is where these situations usually go wrong.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What goes wrong first: treating a PR card as a passport
- The routes that never asked about citizenship
- What changes with citizenship, and what does not
The business plan is the document that answers non-marginality, or fails to
Hypothetical example: Gaspard runs a commercial bakery in Powassan and plans to open a production kitchen in an American city, supplying cafes and grocers rather than selling at retail. He has capital, a signed lease and equipment quotes. What he does not yet have is a plan whose staffing projection can be believed, and that plan is the single document on which the non-marginality question will turn.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What non-marginality asks, and what a projection has to answer
- What makes a projection grounded rather than optimistic
- The rest of the file must not contradict the plan
Secure the premises before you file, because identifying them is not securing them
Hypothetical example: Amara owns a packaging-materials distributor in Powassan supplying food processors and small manufacturers, and she is opening an American warehouse to serve customers she already ships to. She will transfer herself as its manager. Because the American entity will have traded for less than a year, this is a new-office petition, and the requirement that catches such filings is evidence that sufficient physical premises have been secured.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- First: incorporate, capitalize and sign a real lease
- Second: move the money and build the paper that shows capacity
- Third: file, then hire against the chart you filed
The questions that decide L-1A or E-2 are answered in your accountant's files
Hypothetical example: Stefanos owns a restaurant-equipment sales and service company in Powassan, installing and maintaining ovens, refrigeration and dish systems for kitchens across the district. He wants an American presence and cannot tell whether to open a subsidiary and transfer himself, or to invest personally in a company he controls. Most of the deciding facts are not immigration facts at all; they sit in his accountant's files.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Ask the accountant what makes L-1A possible
- Ask a different set of questions about E-2
- Reading the two sets of answers together
One household, three different things that have to be proved
Hypothetical example: the Dubois-Haddad household is moving on an E-2 granted to the principal investor. His wife does not want an American job; she wants to start a business of her own. Their fifteen-year-old will enrol in school. Each of those three plans is proved by different evidence, and the assumption that the principal's approval settles everything is what leaves families stranded.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The principal: ownership, control and capital, evidenced
- The spouse: employment authorization incident to status, and what that reaches
- The fifteen-year-old: school now, and a separate status before twenty-one
Each route makes something conditional, and delay tests a different thing in each
Hypothetical example: Nadine owns a pharmacy and a small group of health services in Powassan and is weighing EB-5 against the Gold Card for her family's move. She has read that EB-5 residence is conditional and that the Gold Card involves vetting and then a gift. What she wants to know is what happens to each if things take longer than anyone promised, because in her experience they always do.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What EB-5 makes conditional, and what a delay does to it
- What the Gold Card framework makes conditional, and where its delay lands
- How the two look different once a delay is assumed