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.
Pelham TN guide: use a reference letter for facts, not an invented credential exception
A reference letter is useful for describing what somebody actually does. It cannot create a qualification that the profession’s own rule demands, and it is not the employer’s support letter on which a TN case turns. Separate the three documents before anybody books travel.
The document that carries a TN case is the U.S. employer’s letter, and it has a fixed job: name the listed profession, describe the duties in enough detail to be matched against it, state the temporary period, and set out the remuneration. Hypothetical example: a Canadian instrumentation specialist is offered work by a U.S. manufacturer, and his supervisor writes a warm letter praising his diagnostic ability. That letter identifies no profession, no duration and no payer. Ask the employer to draft the operative letter first, then treat the reference as an attachment supporting the duties it describes. Where the work could be read as falling under more than one listed profession, choose one deliberately and make the letter consistent with it, because the credential rule that applies from that point onward is that profession’s own rule and no other.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Describe the proposed professional activity
- Preserve the exact qualifications
- Review the actual employment arrangement
Pelham guide: professional recognition does not change citizenship
Canadian permanent residence and Canadian citizenship look alike on a résumé and are entirely different facts in a U.S. immigration file. Establish which one the applicant holds, with a document, before choosing between the routes that turn on nationality and the routes that do not.
Ask for the proof rather than the assumption. Hypothetical example: a U.S. engineering firm offers TN terms to a long-serving Canadian resident because everyone involved has worked alongside her in Canada for a decade; she holds a permanent resident card and a citizenship application that has not yet been decided. TN requires citizenship of Canada or Mexico plus the qualifications set for the listed profession, and a PR card, a social insurance number, a provincial licence and twenty years of Canadian employment do not together establish it. The documents that do are a Canadian passport, a citizenship certificate, or a birth certificate from a Canadian jurisdiction. Settle this before an employer builds a start date on it, since the alternative is discovering it at the border, and ask the same question separately of every family member who intends to rely on a status of their own.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Identify actual citizenship
- Test the routes that do not turn on citizenship
- Use recognition for its actual purpose
Pelham E-2 guide: compare estimated value with the actual investment terms
A valuation report explains what a business might be worth. It does not say what the buyer has committed, where those funds came from, or which entity received them — and those are the questions E-2 actually asks.
Four numbers get confused with one another, and only one of them is qualifying capital. There is the valuation, which is an opinion; the asking price, which is a negotiating position; the consideration actually stated in the executed agreement; and the capital irrevocably committed to the enterprise and placed at risk. Hypothetical example: an independent report values a landscaping contractor well above the agreed price, and the buyer’s summary quietly adopts the higher figure as the size of the investment. Set all four out on one page with their sources and dates, and note who prepared each and on whose instructions. The gap between valuation and price is often the most informative part of the file — it may reflect a motivated seller, or assets that are not being transferred at all — and a gap that has been explained makes every other number easier to credit.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Identify each financial measure
- Preserve commitment and authority
- Assess the real enterprise and financing
Pelham L-1 guide: support a launch narrative with the resources it describes
An enthusiastic letter about a promising U.S. launch is not new-office evidence. The first year turns on a lease or equivalent right to premises fit for the work proposed, money the company can actually deploy, and duties the transferee will genuinely perform.
Split the launch plan into two lists and label them honestly: secured, and intended. Hypothetical example: a director’s letter describes an eight-person U.S. team, a warehouse and a customer pipeline, while the executed documents amount to a twelve-month sublease and two conditional offers of employment. Both lists belong in the petition, and the second is not a weakness where it is presented as a plan with dates, a budget and a named decision-maker behind it. What damages a file is a forecast written in the past tense. Where hiring is planned, say when, at what cost, funded from where, and what happens to the transferee’s own duties once those people start, because the first-year account is precisely an account of change. Keep the letter’s date visible too: a plan written six months before filing may already have been overtaken by events elsewhere in the record.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Describe real and planned support separately
- Apply the actual role-specific conditions
- Use genuine employment and business history
Pelham guide: compare the actual company role and investment rather than the advisers’ labels
The same person can be a transferring executive and a prospective owner, and the two routes ask for different proof drawn from different periods. Work out which set of facts is already true, and which is still a plan, before choosing between them.
An L case is largely retrospective: most of what decides it has already happened. Hypothetical example: a Canadian logistics manager is offered a U.S. posting by her employer’s newly formed American subsidiary in the same month that she is negotiating to buy into an unrelated courier business. The L question is answered by records that exist today — the corporate relationship between employer and subsidiary, both entities doing business, her own continuous full-time year of qualifying employment within the preceding three years, and whether the U.S. assignment is managerial, executive or genuinely specialized-knowledge work. Where those facts are in place the file assembles quickly, because it is a matter of proving history. Where the qualifying year runs to nine months, no amount of enthusiasm from either company changes that, and the sensible response is to wait rather than to redescribe the role.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Explain the transfer proposal
- Explain the investment proposal
- Keep evidence connected to the actual arrangement
Pelham family guide: professional advice does not replace individual status evidence
One favourable opinion about the principal does not cover the household. Write down what each person intends to do in the United States — earn, study, run a business, retire — and test that activity against that person’s own status rather than against the family’s shared plan.
Start with intentions rather than categories. Hypothetical example: an accountant enters in TN status, her spouse plans to keep consulting for his Ontario clients, their 17-year-old will attend high school and their 20-year-old wants a part-time job near campus. Four people, four separate questions, and only one of them is answered by the principal’s classification. Put each person’s name, date of birth, relationship to the principal and intended activity on a single sheet, and revisit it whenever the plan shifts, because plans in a relocating household shift constantly. The 20-year-old’s date of birth belongs on that sheet in bold: eligibility as a temporary dependant generally ends at 21 regardless of where the person is living or which year of study they have reached, and a family that has not noticed the date will certainly notice the consequence.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Describe the real household roles
- Match each intended activity to a permission
- Assess immigrant-family eligibility individually
- Why the principal’s arrival date drives the calendar
Pelham guide: identify what an investor report leaves outside its conclusion
An investor report, an immigration analysis and an official instruction answer three different questions, and they frequently arrive in the same folder. Read each one’s scope and its date before relying on its conclusion for something it never examined.
Most commercial reports state their own limits, usually in a section nobody reads. Hypothetical example: a report on a proposed hospitality project assesses market demand, projected operating costs and the developer’s track record, and its scope note excludes any review of an individual subscriber’s funds or personal circumstances. For an EB-5 applicant that exclusion is the most important sentence in the document, because the personal side is precisely where the applicant’s own case will be decided. Mark up the copy: which subjects were examined, which assumptions the author accepted without verification, which were expressly left out. The useful next step is to obtain the missing analysis, never to describe an excluded subject as settled. Keep the report’s date visible too, since price, ownership, project structure and job methodology all move. And note that a contractual right to repayment of the investor’s capital, or a guaranteed rate of return, puts those funds outside qualifying capital, while an enterprise’s buy-back option exercisable solely at its own discretion falls within a narrow statutory exception that remains subject to sustainment and every other condition, rather than being a repayment entitlement.
WHAT THIS GUIDE COVERS
- Annotate the report’s actual scope
- Test the individual EB-5 account separately
- Identify who is speaking about Gold Card
- Prepare a focused follow-up list
- Answer three questions before comparing the totals