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.
When the degree was earned abroad, the evaluation becomes the document that decides the case
Hypothetical example: Cyrille is a Canadian citizen and a marine engineer in Richmond County, working on propulsion and auxiliary systems for ferries and workboats. His engineering degree was earned in Belgium and he has never had it assessed in North America, because his employer here hired him on experience. An American naval architecture firm now wants him. Engineer is a listed profession with its own qualification rule, and the paperwork proving he meets it is the part he has never had to assemble.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What the Engineer entry actually asks for
- The letter has to describe engineering, in the profession's own words
- What to carry, and what will be asked for at the counter
A permanent resident card proves where you live, and almost nothing a U.S. category asks about
Hypothetical example: Ana Lúcia is a Brazilian citizen and a Canadian permanent resident living in Richmond County, where she works as a social worker for a francophone community services agency. An American nonprofit has approached her about a comparable role. Social Worker appears in the USMCA professions list, so she assumes the route is open. It is not, and the reason has nothing to do with her qualifications: the category is built on citizenship, and her card records residence instead.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Why the listed profession does not help her
- Where nationality follows her passport rather than her address
- The routes that never asked about citizenship
Money in an account is not an investment until it can no longer come back
Hypothetical example: Solange runs a marine survey and naval architecture consultancy in Richmond County and has agreed to buy a small American marine services company. Her lawyer has drafted a purchase agreement that is conditional on the visa being granted, with the price held in escrow and returnable to her if it is refused. That structure protects her commercially and, drafted the wrong way, defeats the application entirely, because the category asks whether the capital is irrevocably committed.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What irrevocable commitment means in a conditional purchase
- The expenditure that has already happened is the best evidence
- Where the money came from matters as much as where it is going
A new office is approved for a year, and the year is an examination
Hypothetical example: Thibault owns a port-logistics software firm in Richmond County that sells berth scheduling and cargo tracking systems, and he is opening an American subsidiary in Portland with himself as its first manager. He expects an approval to give him three years to build the operation. A new-office petition is approved for one year, and what he does inside that year decides whether there is a second, so the plan he files is a commitment rather than a description.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What must exist on the day of filing
- The business plan is read again twelve months later
- By the end of the year he must be managing, not building
Two routes for the same expansion, and they end in different places
Hypothetical example: Élodie owns sixty per cent of a Richmond County ferry and workboat operator, her brother owns the remaining forty, and they want an American chartering arm in Maine. Both an intracompany transfer and a treaty investor application look plausible on the same facts, and advisers have suggested each. The useful comparison is not which is easier to obtain but what each one does to the family in year six, when the business is established and the children are older.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What the same shareholding means to each category
- Ceilings, renewals and what happens when they run out
- Questions to put to an American lawyer before the entity is formed
One household, four people, and four different answers about work and school
Hypothetical example: the Samson-Marchand household is considering a move after an American university library offered Yolande a professional post. Librarian is a listed profession and she is a Canadian citizen, so her own position is the simplest in the family. Her husband is self-employed in Richmond County, their younger child is twelve and the elder turns twenty-one in fourteen months. Each of those three facts produces a different answer, and none of them follows automatically from hers.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The principal's route does not distribute itself to everybody
- A self-employed spouse has to solve his own problem
- Twelve and twenty are different legal situations, not different ages
One route asks you to risk money; the other asks you to part with it
Hypothetical example: Gérard and Régine have sold their share of a marine bunkering partnership in Richmond County and are weighing the immigrant investor route against the Gold Card for themselves and their seventeen-year-old. They have been told the two are alternatives at different price points. They are not comparable in that way at all, and the clearest way to see the difference is to ask what each one leaves them holding if everything goes exactly to plan.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What the investor route asks, and what remains at the end of it
- What the Gold Card asks, and what remains at the end of that
- How a household actually chooses between them