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 licence-based profession is proved by the regulator, not by the employer
Hypothetical example: Nkechi is a Canadian citizen and a registered occupational therapist in Petrolia who assesses injured plant workers and designs return-to-work programmes. A refinery contractor in Louisiana wants her to build the same programme for its sites. Occupational Therapist appears in USMCA Appendix 2, and the entry turns on a licence, which means the decisive document is issued by a regulator rather than by the company hiring her.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Find out which document the entry actually requires before collecting anything else
- A state licence that has not issued is a scheduling problem, not a paperwork problem
- Contracting to several sites is where this arrangement most often goes wrong
Permanent residence in Canada opens some routes and closes exactly one
Hypothetical example: Rasheed is a citizen of Egypt with Canadian permanent residence, working as a chemical process technologist for a Petrolia blending company. He has been offered a role at the group's American plant and assumes his permanent resident card places him where a Canadian passport would. It does not, for one category only. Understanding which one, and which routes never asked about Canadian citizenship at all, usually reorders the plan rather than ending it.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The professional route under USMCA is the category that asks for citizenship
- Intracompany transfer never asked about nationality in the first place
- Treaty investment depends on his own nationality, and that is a fact to look up
Money becomes an investment at the moment it stops being available
Hypothetical example: Ophelie plans to open a distributor of industrial water-treatment chemicals in Michigan, supplying cooling towers and boiler systems for plants she already knows through her Petrolia employer. She has set aside the funds, prepared a plan and asked when to apply. The honest answer is that she does not yet have an investment. She has capital, and the two are treated very differently by the people who will read her file.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The evidence that converts capital into investment is receipts, not balances
- Conditional structures are normal, and they have to be drafted with care
- Non-marginality is answered by the payroll the plan actually produces
A new office is approved for a year and judged on what that year produced
Hypothetical example: Hyacinth owns a pipeline-integrity data firm in Petrolia that analyses inline inspection results for operators. She is opening an American office to serve clients on the Gulf Coast and expects to transfer herself as its executive. A first petition in that situation is a new office petition, approved for one year rather than three, and the extension at the end of that year is decided on evidence that did not exist when the first petition was filed.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The first petition is judged on capacity, and premises are the usual sticking point
- What the first twelve months have to produce for the extension to succeed
- Two habits that cause avoidable trouble in a first year
Ask what happens to each route if you sell the company or leave the job
Hypothetical example: Konstantin owns a valve and rotating-equipment overhaul shop in Petrolia and could reach the American market either by transferring himself into a company his own group would establish there, or by buying a going concern outright as a treaty investor. Both are workable on the facts. The question that separates them for him is not which is easier to obtain but which survives the events he can already foresee: a sale, a retirement, or a change of mind.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Transfer status is tied to an employment relationship and to a corporate link
- Treaty investor status is tied to ownership, and ownership can be sold
- Questions worth putting to an American accountant and to counsel before choosing
Draw the household timeline before the assignment, because two clocks run at once
Hypothetical example: the Achterberg household leaves Petrolia on a specialized-knowledge transfer. The principal has a five-year ceiling. His spouse is a medical laboratory technologist who intends to work. Their elder child is nineteen and starting university; the younger is fourteen. Nothing about that arrangement is unusual, and its two clocks, the ceiling on the principal's status and the elder child's twenty-first birthday, will collide in the middle of the assignment unless somebody draws them on the same page first.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The spouse is authorized to work, and the authorization comes from her status
- A child's derivative status ends at twenty-one, whatever the school calendar says
- Each person's own activity decides their route, and the parents' plan does not cover it
One route asks for your money and your time; the other asks only for the money
Hypothetical example: Ferdinand is an industrial engineer in Petrolia who has sold a controlling stake in the instrumentation business he founded and now has liquid capital and no employer. He is weighing the immigrant investor route against the Gold Card. The comparison that helps him is not which is faster but what each one still requires of him after approval, because one imposes continuing obligations for years and the other imposes none at all.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What the investor route requires after the petition is approved
- What the Gold Card requires, and what it does not
- How the two comparisons actually resolve for a household