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.
Make the credential, the offer letter and the treaty list say one profession
Hypothetical example: Priya is a medical laboratory technologist in Saint-Alphonse-de-Granby. Her Quebec permit uses one professional title, the American hospital's posting advertises a clinical laboratory scientist, and the treaty list uses a third form of words. Nothing dishonest is happening, and her qualifications are not in doubt. The application is still fragile, because three documents describing the same person in three vocabularies leave an officer to decide which one is the profession being claimed.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Pick the listed name and make everything else defer to it
- Then satisfy that profession's own rule, in its own terms
- Watch the boundaries the letter can accidentally cross
What actually changes on the day permanent residence becomes citizenship
Hypothetical example: Wanjiru is a Kenyan citizen with Canadian permanent residence, working as a psychologist and living in Saint-Alphonse-de-Granby. Her citizenship ceremony is scheduled for the spring. An American employer wants her sooner, and somebody has told her that eleven years of residence is as good as a passport. It is not, for two routes; it is irrelevant, for two others. Knowing which is which lets her decide whether to wait for the ceremony or to stop waiting.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The two routes that turn on nationality
- The routes that never asked about her passport
- Say which fact you are stating, on every form and at every counter
When does spending on a start-up become capital that is actually committed
Hypothetical example: Corentin is not buying an existing business. From Saint-Alphonse-de-Granby he is building an American infection-control and specialized cleaning contractor for clinics and dental practices: a signed lease, a truck ordered, equipment quoted, staff identified but not hired, and the bulk of the money still in his personal account. He wants to know how much of that is investment. The honest answer sorts his spending into three piles, and only one of them counts today.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Three piles: irrevocably committed, recoverable, and merely intended
- Real and operating beats impressive and idle
- Sequence the commitment so it is provable when it is examined
Whether a young American subsidiary makes this a new-office petition at all
Hypothetical example: Léandre's company in Saint-Alphonse-de-Granby manufactures stainless washdown and sanitation stations for food plants, clinics and care residences. The group is thirty years old, which everyone finds reassuring, but the American subsidiary was incorporated four months ago and so far consists of a bank account, a registered address and a website. He wants to transfer his production manager. The age of the group is not the question. The age and activity of the entity that will employ the transferee is.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Doing business means trading, not existing
- What a first-year approval buys, and what it will ask for later
- Do not let the first year turn the manager into the workforce
When owning all of it helps one route and complicates the other
Hypothetical example: Emmanuelle owns one hundred per cent of a company in Saint-Alphonse-de-Granby that services and calibrates weighing and dosing equipment for feed mills, pharmacies and laboratories. She could open an American branch and transfer herself into it, or she could invest personally in an American operation. Sole ownership is the strongest possible fact for one of those routes and an awkward one for the other, and the reason has nothing to do with how much she is worth.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Why total ownership suits the investor route
- Why the same fact raises questions on the transfer route
- Decide on the ending, not the entry
The spouse's own offer, and why the principal's category decides whether she can accept it
Hypothetical example: in the Bergeron-Okafor household in Saint-Alphonse-de-Granby, both adults have American prospects. He has an offer as a listed professional; she has been approached separately by a laboratory in the same state. They assumed she could simply accompany him and start work. Whether she can depends entirely on which category he travels in, and the difference between the two candidates is absolute rather than a matter of degree.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The dependant status that permits no work at all
- The dependant status that permits work automatically
- Assess each person on their own activity, then choose
What each route asks you to prove about the money, and who you must prove it to
Hypothetical example: Ondrej has sold a business and is comparing the immigrant investor route with the Gold Card framework from Saint-Alphonse-de-Granby. He has been shown both as prices. That is the wrong axis. One route asks him to prove where every dollar came from and what it will build; the other asks him to pass vetting and then give money away. The evidential burden, not the figure, is what should decide it.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What the investor route asks him to prove
- What the Gold Card framework asks him to pay
- Two different exposures, and neither is a purchase of status