L1 Visa – Intracompany Transferee

L1 Visa Applications in Ottawa, ON

The L-1 visa enables a U.S. employer to transfer an executive, senior manager or specialized knowledge worker from one of its affiliated foreign offices to one of its offices in the United States. This classification also enables a foreign company which does not yet have an affiliated U.S. office to send an executive or manager or specialized knowledge worker to the United States with the purpose of establishing one.

To qualify, the named employee must also:

• Have been working for a qualifying organization abroad for one continuous year within the three years immediately preceding his or her admission to the United States; and
• Be seeking to enter the United States to provide service in an executive, senior managerial or specialized knowledge capacity for a branch of the same employer or one of its qualifying organizations. -Executive capacity generally refers to the employee’s ability to make decisions of wide latitude without much oversight.
• Senior managerial capacity generally refers to the ability of the employee to supervise and control the work of professional employees and to manage the organization, or a department, subdivision, function, or component of the organization. It may also refer to the employee’s ability to manage an essential function of the organization at a high level, without direct supervision of others.
• Specialized knowledge workers include those with a knowledge of the employers proprietary product or process that cannot be found in the labor market and has been gained through years of training and work experience.

For foreign employers seeking to send an employee to the United States as an executive or manager to establish a new office, the employer must also show that:

• The employer has secured sufficient physical premises to house the new office;
• The intended U.S. office will support an executive or managerial position within one year of the approval of the petition.

Qualified employees entering the United States to establish a new office will be allowed a maximum initial stay of one year. All other qualified employees will be allowed a maximum initial stay of three years. For all L-1 employees, requests for extension of stay may be granted in increments of up to an additional two years, until the employee has reached the maximum limit of seven years.

The transferring employee may be accompanied or followed by his or her spouse and unmarried children who are under 21 years of age. Such family members may seek admission in L-2 non-immigrant classification and, if approved, generally will be granted the same period of stay as the employee.