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.
The credential that gets a surveyor admitted is not the one that lets her practise
Hypothetical example: Nadia Petrenko is a Canadian citizen and an Ontario land surveyor whose firm has been asked to retrace boundaries along an American rail corridor and around a terminal the railway wants to expand. She holds a provincial licence and a degree, so the profession's own rule is comfortably met. Her file still has two separate problems to solve: what a border officer needs to see, and what a state regulator will require before anyone signs a plan.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Two authorities, two entirely different questions
- Describe surveying, and keep the described scope from drifting
- Every crossing reopens the file, so keep it assembled
A permanent resident card answers a question the American border is not asking
Hypothetical example: Larysa Kovalenko is a citizen of Ukraine and a Canadian permanent resident, working in Thunder Bay as a meteorologist producing marine forecasts for a shipping operator. An American company in the same field has offered her a position. Meteorologist is a listed profession and her degree is squarely within it, which is why she assumes the route is straightforward. It is not available to her at all, and the reason has nothing to do with her qualifications.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The two facts about her, and which one each route reads
- The routes that never asked about Canadian citizenship
- What naturalization would change, and what it would not
Money that can still be recalled has not been invested yet
Hypothetical example: Kwabena Mensah distributes conveyor components and marine deck equipment from a Thunder Bay warehouse and wants to open an American branch serving terminals on the other side of the lake. He has budgeted a sum he considers substantial and has it sitting in a business account, ready to move once a visa is issued. That sequence feels prudent and is the most common reason an otherwise strong treaty investor application is refused, because the money has not been placed at risk.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What being at risk actually excludes
- Borrowed money, and the security that destroys it
- Substantial is a ratio, and the denominator is the business
A new office gets one year, and the petition becomes the standard it is judged by
Hypothetical example: Teodora Marinescu owns a Thunder Bay company that manages railcar fleets and arranges interchange for bulk shippers, and she intends to open her first American office at a midwestern interchange point. She expects to be transferred there to run it. Because the American entity will have been doing business for less than a year when the petition is filed, it is treated as a new office, and the approval that follows is shorter and more conditional than most people expect.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- One year is the whole of the initial grant
- The extension is measured against what was filed
- The Canadian company has to remain alive and trading
Ask what happens to each route on the day you sell the Canadian company
Hypothetical example: Jarmo Virtanen owns a marine surveying and cargo-inspection company in Thunder Bay and is weighing a transfer into an American entity against buying an American inspection business outright. Advisers have given him a list of differences, most of which he finds abstract. One question makes the comparison concrete, because it exposes what each route actually depends on: what would happen to his status, and his family's, if he sold or wound up the Canadian company in three years?
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- A transfer depends on two companies staying related and trading
- An investor route depends on a nationality and a business he controls
- Different endings, and what each does to the household
Four people, four sets of permissions, and one birthday that ends part of it
Hypothetical example: the Ojanpera household is preparing to move for an intracompany transfer. The principal will hold specialized-knowledge status, the spouse intends to keep working, the elder child turns twenty-one in fourteen months, and the younger is twelve. Nobody in the family has a status of their own; all three depend on the principal's. What each of them may do differs, and the differences are not intuitive, so they are worth writing down before anyone resigns a job or accepts a school place.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- The principal's category writes everybody else's rights
- The child fourteen months from twenty-one
- Study is broadly permitted; work almost never is
One route interrogates where the money came from; the other asks you to give it away
Hypothetical example: Mireille Sauve runs a bulk-cargo brokerage in Thunder Bay and has the liquidity to consider either the employment-creation immigrant category or the Gold Card framework. She has been told the two are alternatives at different price points, which is how they are usually presented and is misleading. They ask for different things, they place her money in entirely different positions, and they fail in different ways, so the comparison has to be built on what each one demands rather than on the headline figures.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- What the employment-creation route demands of her money
- What the Gold Card framework demands instead
- The comparison that helps, and the one that misleads