Immigrating your Startup to the USA

Hello everyone, uh, welcome to this edition of, uh, the Founder Institute Graduate Master Session. Uh, I'm Mike Supravici. Um, I run the Graduate Success Team here at the Founder Institute, and we have a very special guest today, Nikki, uh, who's going to talk about one of the most relevant and important topics, uh, today, uh, on immigration. So, uh, Nikki, if you don't mind maybe giving a quick introduction about yourself, that'd be a a really good way for us to get started.

All right, well, thank you so much for having me. It's very fun to talk to all of you, imagining where you're all sitting today. So I'm born in Canada, so I— and then immigrated to the United States myself and as a young person. So I completely understand the draw of the United States and the American dream because I certainly had it and moved there when I was about 18 and figured— kept you know, being my own immigration lawyer, which I do not recommend, you know, figuring out ways to stay. And I, I was very lucky. I had a second life as a swimmer and was able to get my green card that way. But certainly it took me over 20 years to become a US citizen. Hopefully if you hire me, I will be better now because I've learned all my mistakes through my own, my own immigration story. But yeah, so now I'm an immigration lawyer at PwC and I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, founders, startups. Helping them navigate US immigration laws and get to the United States. So, you know, I love the excitement of working with people in tech and innovation, and I know that you move all way faster than everybody in the law, and so I try to keep up with you.

Yeah, that's great. And, you know, everyone that's dialing in— looks like a lot of people are starting to dial in now. Hello, everyone. If you notice on the right-hand side of your screen, there's a chat room. Feel free to basically ask questions here and I will relay them to Nikki as she goes through her presentation. And, you know, we want this to be as interactive as possible. We're doing this for you. So make sure that, you know, you ask as many questions that come up. I know this is a very important topic and we have a world expert on this issue. So, you know, take advantage of this. So Nikki, I believe that you have a presentation. So, Do you want to go ahead and share that now? Yeah. Go ahead. OK.

OK, how's that looking?

It's looking great. Perfect.

All right, wonderful.

All right.

OK. Let's go. All right, then. All right, I'll take it away, everybody. Okay. Oh, little tech problem here. It won't let me go forward.

If you just— yeah, just go ahead and close that. And if you just select the right—

there we go. There we go. So that's my colleague Derek, who didn't quite make it, but I just— I apologize that you're gonna have to listen to my voice for the next next hour or so. At PwC, I'm part of a very large immigration team and we do have people all over the world that can help you pretty much wherever you're located in the world. This is just a nice view of the couple of us that work there and help with US immigration matters. One of my expertises is working at the consulate, helping people with the final step of their process, the visa application. But also we work with filings to the United States immigration as well. I'm going to start with some of the bad news because I think it's really important. American immigration news is actually probably quite global. I live outside the United States now and I certainly am hearing it in the local news here. It's quite unprecedented. Not since 9/11 have we seen such a dramatic shift in the immigration policy. To be honest, it's actually even worse than after 9/11. So just the tone, the way immigration is a topic in United States news, it's a very current event in the political landscape as well. And I think what that means for you as you're planning to move to the United States is that you have to be prepared. Long gone are the days when you could just jump on a plane and get in and, you know, do things on a tourist visa. You really have to be prepared. You have to be prepared for every step of the way when you're going to interact with a U.S. government official. You know, I tell everybody to pay for good strategy. You know, I know that cost is always going to be an issue with the startup, but the most important thing you do is pay to get good advice. You don't have to pay PwC to implement it, but pay for somebody who knows what they're talking about to give you the strategy involved. And to help you put in place compliance mechanisms because things are only going to get worse. And as many of you probably know, there's a really big election coming up in the United States called the midterm elections, which is going to happen in November. And immigration is certainly being used as a tool in all of those political contests. What this has meant, how this has played out, is that there's been a huge increase in funding for what we call immigration enforcement. And don't think that this just means people that are sitting in the United States working unlawfully in particular industries like sweatshops and stuff. This is happening at the border, at LAX, at JFK. So when you come into the United States by plane, there are more officials that can interact with you. So we'll talk a little bit about temporary travel and stuff before you get the startup going and what kind of visas you come in. But I think it's important to understand that when you land at the airport, it is the CBP officers or Customs and Border Protection officers. Their job is they are law enforcement officers. They think of themselves as a federal police. They are not there to facilitate international trade and commerce. That's the job of the State Department and we will talk about them later. You have to be prepared that if you would like to enter the United States, you must be willing to surrender everything that you have with you and to a search. The Supreme Court has ruled that any search at the US border is considered reasonable. What that means is that the border officer, if you would like to gain admission, your laptop is the same as a suitcase and your fingerprint and your passcode to your phone are considered the keys to your suitcase. You need to keep everything clean. I recommend all my clients keep everything on the cloud. And log out of every single device before they enter the United States. That's not just because you might be not following the immigration law. That's actually just because you don't really want the contents of your laptop, whatever you're working on, to be going into a U.S. government database. If you do end up in secondary inspection, they pop a— now this is where my tech knowledge does— is you guys are going to be embarrassed by me, but you know, they'll pop a device into your laptop and they download everything. Then where does it go? I think that's the kind of thing. It's not just about you gaining admission to the United States. It's about actually protecting the contents of your laptops and your ideas. Where we're also seeing this play out is once you get to the United States and you're in an office environment. US immigration has increased their fraud visits. If you have any employees, it doesn't need to be you. It could be a colleague who's working on an L visa or an H-1B. So let's just say you're working in a shared worksite somewhere, right? So you may not have the same corporate structure as the person sitting next to you, but you're all in a shared work environment. If CBP— or sorry, if U.S. immigration comes knocking to visit somebody on an H-1B visa at the desk next to you, who knows? They might just say, hey, what are you doing here? Where's your papers? And so these kind of fraud visits are increasing. And then the other way that they, what they've just done recently is the Department of Labor just issued 5,000 employers with audits for I-9 verification. So any U.S. employer that hires anyone in the United States, whether they're a U.S. citizen or a foreign national, has to issue them with a paper called an I-9 and the employee has to fill it out. And those I-9 forms have to be kept at the worksite. This is another way the US government is going after even lawful employers. The other big thing to be worried about, we will talk about arrests, but the other thing we're seeing is for the last few years, and I think it even started under the Obama administration, if you were in the United States, let's say you've got your visa, you're doing great, everything's wonderful, You've got— oops, sorry. You get arrested for a DUI, which is a driving under the influence or driving while intoxicated. Immediately, that information in the U.S. criminal database will get sent over to the consulate where you got your visa and your visa will be automatically revoked. You don't even have to be convicted of the DUI. That's because driving under the influence is considered a health ground of inadmissibility to the United States, not a criminal ground. And they think that you are considered— if you have it, if you're driving under when you're impaired, you have a— you're a habitual drunkard. Now, this— what we're seeing now is this is taken to a next level. People are being arrested in the United States for other things and their visas are being revoked. If this happens, don't move. It doesn't mean you have to leave the United States, and that's the big thing. Just go talk to an immigration lawyer. The last thing to just be wary of is there's obviously, I think there's a chance that another federal budget needs to be decided on in US Congress by October. If that happens and there's another US federal government shutdown, it's going to delay processing to these three visa categories because they all are connected to the Department of Labor. Most immigration functions will continue because they are user pay. You and your employer will pay lots of money to the US government to adjudicate your case. But these 3 things down there don't have that, and so they will stop processing. If you want to be going to the United States in October, you need to be organized in September because it might only shut down for a few days or a few weeks, but this is all going to delay everything to get to the United States. All right, so let's just take a huge step back. Now that I've painted a very horrible picture, obviously lots of people do go to the United States and so I just want to explain one simple sort of, well, some complex concept. So there's two types of ways you can go to the United States. One as a non-immigrant, which is a temporary person, and one is an immigrant, which means permanent. Non-immigrant visa holders, so everyone that lands at the, at that, you know, LAX or JFK or Houston, they have to prove that they have no intention of staying permanently in the United States. When you go on a tourist visa or you go on business visitor or if you go on an E-3 for Aussies, you have to prove that you're not staying forever. There's a few visas that let you have what we call dual intent but for the most part, this is all temporary work visas. Alternative is a green card which is permanent residence in the United States. There's only 5 ways you can get that: family-based, employer-based, self-sponsored— those are for people of extraordinary ability and we will talk about that a bit later— the diversity lottery that probably will go away. The diversity lottery has been something that the Trump administration has set their sights on getting rid of. They've been using it as a bargaining tool in immigration. I think the diversity lottery usually happens from September to December, October to December, that period of time. It's a State Department program, but I have a feeling it won't happen this year, but we'll have to just keep your eyes out. And then the last way to get a green card is to buy your green card through investment of half a million, $2 million, with those numbers going up. The other big concept I just want to explain, and this just goes to all the US government agencies that are involved in different parts process is that there are US-based filings and then there are overseas or consular-based filings. This is really critical right now because if you can fit yourself into one of these consular-based cases, that's what you want to try to do because filings that are going to US immigration in the United States are under enormous scrutiny, like unprecedented scrutiny. What happens when you file a petition to US immigration? Typically, a small amount of them would get issued what's called a request for evidence, which is like an audit where the government wants more information. Those are now increased quite a lot and then denials have increased. The other thing that's scary is that if you're actually in the United States when one of these is filed and it's denied, they're now automatically putting you into deportation proceedings. You're starting to get the idea that things are really— you cannot do this alone. You have to have a good immigration lawyer guiding you through this process because the stakes now are so high, not to mention the cost. The kinds of cases that file to US immigration are the one that probably all of you have heard about which is the H-1B. We'll talk about that later. The intercompany transfer, O-1 for people of extraordinary ability, and entrepreneur parole, which we will also discuss. The consular-based cases, which is where the case is actually adjudicated by the US State Department overseas. That means when you go into the consulate, you are arguing for yourself the requirements of the category, not just that you're eligible for the visa. Now, the ones at the top, you also need to go to a visa, but it's a slightly different process than these ones at the bottom where you actually are applying for the visa and they're adjudicating it right there. So that's the EASE for investors and traders and for Auspies, the blanket intercompany transfer, but that's for really big companies. And then some of these other ones, which we will talk about in a bit. So you have got this great opportunity in the United States. You want to go over either to do some kind of, you know, maybe you got into an accelerator program. Maybe you just want to go talk to VCs. You know, maybe you just want to go have a look. Maybe, you know, you just, you know, there's a whole bunch of reasons why you might want to legitimate business travel to the United States before you decide you want to go over there and work. You'll hear these terms thrown around quite a bit. ESTA, Visa Waiver Program, and the B-1. Those are basically all kind of the same. They mean all the same thing, which is that you are applying for admission to the United States as a business visitor. ESTA is really just the name of the electronic program that certain people can use to apply for the VWP or Visa Waiver Program. Depending on your country, your passport, will depend whether you're eligible to use the Visa Waiver Program. If you aren't from one of those countries, then you're going to have to go to a US consulate and apply for a B-1 visa. The difference between them is that the Visa Waiver Program allows entry in the United States for up to 90 days at a time. That does not mean you can fly in for 9 days, fly out for a week, and come back for another 90 days. This is meant for temporary travel, and this is where I'm starting to see a lot of, you know, entrepreneurs get caught because they're abusing this, the visa waiver program, traveling in and out of the United States, treating this as like just recharging the 90 days and spending way too much time in the United States. You are not supposed to be living in the United States on this visa category. Even the B-1, which you might, depending on what your country passport is, you might get issued a 1-year B visa, you might get issued a 5-year B visa. You might get issued a 10-year B visa if you're from China. That doesn't mean you get to stay in the United States for 10 years. It means that when you land at the airport, you will be admitted for up to 6 months at a time. Again, do not stay there for 6 months unless you have spoken to an immigration lawyer about what you're doing there. But what it means is it's just different. Those are all the same categories. You cannot perform productive work in the United States. There's only one piece of immigration case law that describes what you can do in B-1 status. And you guys are going to laugh at me because this has nothing to do with what any of you are probably doing. But you need to put your business and your startup into this box. OK, so the case law is of a tailor, like a men's suit sewer, like someone who sews men's suits. He was based in Hong Kong. He came to the United States to— because all his customers were in the United States. He would measure them for their suits. Then he would fly home and sew the suits in Hong Kong. That is allowed under the business visitor travel. So you can go to the United States, you can talk to colleagues, you can talk to VCs, you can go to conferences. There's a whole bunch of things you can do. But as long as you bring all that information back to your home country where you actually work on the project or do the work. OK. I've talked already about, you know, I've talked a little bit about some of these issues, you know, because where you're going to get caught is at the border. So if you go in and you say, oh, yep, I've got a startup, you know, I'm already working on it. The second you use the word work, you're not going to be allowed into the United States. They are increasing the scrutiny of all business travelers, as I said, because there is just a lot more money for law enforcement. You just need to be prepared. One important thing when you are traveling into the United States for business travel, you need to make sure that your social media and anything that's publicly available on Google is corresponding to the immigration status that you have. If you have on your LinkedIn profile Sydney and New York and you don't have a work visa for the US, then you're going to be in a lot of trouble because then right away they're going to Google you and see, well, why do you have New York on your LinkedIn profile? You say, well, I'm based there and I get customers. No, no, no, no, no. Your social media presence has to correspond with your home country. So LinkedIn profile, keep it— don't say Silicon Valley and London. You say London. The same with any tweeting you do. You know, less likely, probably. But, you know, anything that you put out there, in terms of like, "Hey, I'm going to the US. I can't wait to start my business." You have to be very careful and smart. That might hurt some of your business opportunities, but it's better to get into the United States than to be stopped because you have something out there on social media that doesn't correspond. We talked about the visa revocations of DUIs when you're in the US, but this is one that is really important, especially for any Canadians that might be on the call. Given that marijuana has— I think it's coming into legalization soon. If you are at the border and the officer says to you, "Have you ever done illegal drugs, smoked marijuana, for example?" and you say, "Yeah, I smoke marijuana in Canada all the time because it's legal there," or, "Yes, I've actually been to Colorado and smoked marijuana in Colorado where it's legal," you will be denied entry to the United States. Marijuana is not legal at a federal level. Even if it's legal in the country where you might have smoked it, even if it's legal in an American state where you might have been, it does not mean that it's legal to the federal government. If you make an admission at the border to smoking marijuana or any kind of recreational drug that's unlawful, you will be denied entry to the United States and it will be at least a year before I or any other lawyer can get you back. And that's because an admission of drug use is not so much a criminal act because you haven't admitted to commit breaking any laws, but what you've done is you admitted that you have a health ground of inadmissibility and that you need to be rehabilitated before you can get back to the United States. I do have clients where they are asked this at the border and you just need to be prepared for that kind of questioning. Again, still on business visitor travel. There are a lot of things that you can do. You can go over, take goods for manufacturing abroad. You can negotiate contracts. My tax colleagues at PwC are the ones that say don't sign the contract in the United States. I think that's It's also probably good from an immigration perspective. So let's just say you go over to the US, you're meeting with all these investors, they're throwing money at you left, right, and center. You're so excited. They're like putting contracts in front of you. Do not sign them when you're physically present in the United States. That's important. You know, unless you have spoken to a tax advisor and an immigration lawyer, you know, even if, well, if they're throwing $5 million at you, maybe you do want to just give us a call and we'll talk to you in the moment. But it's really important that you get advice both on a tax front and an immigration front before you start signing things when you're in the US as a business visitor. The things that you— and then so within that B visa context, there's also— so there's all these things that you're allowed to do which are passive activities. Think about listening, learning, absorbing, taking information in as opposed to doing like working on your thing, producing work out product for clients, deliverables, all those things are bad. But there are exceptions to when you can do some work in the United States. And this is like, for example, professional athletes. So if you're a professional tennis player, you can go into the United States, play at the US Open, make the prize money, and then go back to Monaco or wherever it is that you live. My favorite exception to the B-1 is yacht boat captains. I actually had to do one of these. So obviously if someone is a, you know, sails a boat, they need to be able to bring the boat to the shore of the United States, which is work, but it would be silly because they're probably only touching shore for a little bit of time. There's a couple others. So after-sales installation, service, and repairs. This is kind of, could be a good one for either physical hardware or software. So this is where you would sell into the United States The contract would be with an overseas company. The US customer in this, in the sale of service, you have written into the contract that your people overseas are going to be needed to come to the United States to help service or train US citizens on how to use the software or the hardware. So that's a really good one for if you are, if you're doing sales into the United States on a very technical product where you need to bring your people over to help train the buyers, that is allowed under the visa waiver program or the B-1. People who are going to be investing in the United States in an E-2 capacity, and we'll talk a bit more about that, they are allowed to go over to the United States and set up a business as long as they don't start working for the business. And then there's another carve-out which is really awesome. The B-1 in lieu of H-1B and the B-1 in lieu of H-3 are two sort of creations of the State Department. Again, that's the consulate. What they've realized is that their job is to facilitate international trade and commerce in the United States. Because US immigration is so hard to get a visa, they have sort of said, well, there's exceptions. You can go on a B-1 visa, but we're gonna— as long as you tell us what you're going to be doing, we will allow you to perform this very specific activity for a very short period of time. The B-1 in lieu of H-1B allows you to go over to the United States for short-term projects of up to 6 months max, where you stay on foreign payroll. Let's just say your company is based in Romania. You would stay on Romanian payroll and you work for your Romanian company. The only reason you have to be in the US is because there's some thing that you have to— a project that you have to do that no US citizen can do. That's a really great visa that I use a lot. There was a period of— it depends where you're from. I would be very cautious about using that if you're from India or China. But if you're from other countries, and depending on how big your company is, you might be able to use that. The B-1 in lieu of H-3 is for training. So if you're going over for an accelerator program, and you're— and you actually, that's all you want to do. You actually don't want to move to the US with your business. You actually just want to go to this, this program and then come back to your home country. That a B-1 and move H-3 is awesome because it allows you to stay again for longer than that. If you— if especially if the accelerator is like 4 months instead of, you know, 3 months, you need to stay in the US a little bit longer to receive this training that you can only get in the United States. And then you're going to come back to, then you're going to come back to your home country to implement the training. So that's a, those are amazing categories, and especially for people at the beginning of their, their journey to the United States. So this one, any questions, Mike, or should I keep going?

There's a couple questions. So I have some questions, but there's a question in the chat room. Is it, what are like the standard processing times on the E-1 and E-2 visas?

Okay, so it depends on what country you're in. So I was just looking at London right now. So if you're British and you're applying for an E-2 in London, just to get them to acknowledge that you've submitted the papers is taking 2 weeks. Then it takes 45 days for them to review your petition and then another 2 to 3 weeks to book the interview. London, horribly backlogged. I think all of that told is probably at least 2 to 3 months before you could submit. From the time you submit the package, which can take a really long time just to gather all the evidence, to actually getting your passport back with the visa in London is taking over 3 months. That's probably the longest in any country. Whereas you compare that to Australia and it's like 2 weeks. So there's going to be a real range and it's very country-specific.

You also mentioned, made a comment about it being a little bit more, at least this is how I inferred it, a little bit more difficult if you're from China or India in regards to some of the E-1 visas. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Yeah, so listen, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that In the context of immigration, immigration is a national security issue. What that means is that the government agencies involved in immigration are allowed to discriminate, for lack of a better word. All those protected grounds under the U.S. Constitution that Americans take so dearly, those are not necessarily protected for people who are trying to come into the United States from abroad. You will be treated differently if you're from a country with either higher document fraud or a country with a history of not following U.S. immigration laws. Obviously, most people know about the Muslim travel ban that unfortunately the Supreme Court upheld in part, which basically allows the U.S. government to discriminate against people from certain Muslim countries. All of this is allowed under US immigration law, unfortunately, and what that means is that you will be treated differently if you are white from an English-speaking country that's typically Western to somebody who is from a Muslim country or something like that. This is just an unfortunate— this is just the way it works and you just have to be really prepared and understand that you will be treated differently. It's really a unfortunate, but that's why, again, you want to have somebody to help you with that strategy of how to present yourself.

And the last question related to this topic, Nikki, so, you know, you may cover this later in the presentation, so feel free to let me know that, but let's suppose, you know, a lot of our companies maybe just want to be able to do a lot of sales and business development, you know, which is kind of related to some of the things you've talked about in, you know, in the United States, and, you know, some of that may take take long, long time. Let's say it takes like a couple of years for, for, for some of these projects to get going just because the sales cycles are long and things like that. So how would they best optimize for something like this?

So really you want to be tracking your time, your physical presence in the United States for sure. And that's not just from an immigration perspective, but also from a tax one. And this is where it pays to get the good tax advice first before you go and spend too much time in the United States and start racking up tax bills. So, you know, I think you want to keep— you have to keep a calendar of how much time you're physically in the United States. You want to do that for tax reasons, and I'm not a tax person, but obviously there's going to be triggers that as soon as you spend too much time in the United States, there's going to be tax consequences to you personally as well as potentially your foreign business. You also need to be aware of what state you're in. So in California, There are tax consequences even when there's federal treaties. So between Australia and the US, if they're fed from a federal perspective, there's tax treaties that cover it. But if you're physically present in California, those rules don't apply. And the same with New Jersey, from what I understand from my tax colleagues. So you really have to be tracking not just when you're in the United States, but what state you're in the United States. And then you want to end from an immigration perspective. You want to be looking at that holistically. So for taxes, they actually do start looking back in time. They'll go, okay, here's your first year in the United States. We're going to count this many days and the second, and it goes on like that analysis. But for immigration, it's similar, right? So if you tell me you've been in the US for 6 months, like on and off last year in 2017, I'd be like, oh, you better keep that pretty low next year as well. So it's really just, you know, there's no precise formula. It's a little bit of an art when I'm talking to clients about how much time they're in the United States. What it comes back to is, where do you reside? What evidence do you have to prove that you're only in the United States temporarily, that you're only doing passive business visitor activities, and that you actually are back in your home country and that's where you live? If you're a single man, it's a lot harder because you have nothing tying you back to your home country. If you have a spouse and kids, obviously bring evidence, some kind of evidence that you're going back to them. If you have a job, I write letters, I call them comfort letters for all of my clients who are doing lots of frequent business travel. What a comfort letter is, is a sort of legal argument as well as fact-specific about what the person is going to be doing in the United States for the time period. And it just gives the employee or the founder or whoever just a little bit of guidance so that when they do get off the plane after a an 8 or 14 or even a 5-hour flight, they've read this letter, they go, yep, this is what I'm going to be doing on this particular trip. This is why I still meet the requirements of a temporary visitor, and I'm going to have that in my carry-on bag. And if immigration wants to ask, it's going to be published on my foreign company letterhead, and I'm going to be able to show it. A lot of people make the mistake at the border of talking about how much they love America, how many great connections they have in the United States. Oh, please let me in. I'm, you know, I have all this great stuff happening. It's like the opposite. You want to talk about your home country connections. Well, I have a wife and kids back home, or I have a husband and a dog, and I have a thriving business. I've got like 3 employees that work underneath me. I've got government grants in my home country, and it's there that I live. I just happen to be coming over for some business meetings.

Great. Let's keep going. This is awesome, by the way.

All right. Okay, awesome. So this next one, I feel like, you know, this could have been so great. And so basically, but, you know, I think I won't spend too much time on it because I think I would be— I don't know of many immigration lawyers who are trying to do this. Basically, it's called entrepreneur parole. It would be perfect for a lot of entrepreneurs. Basically, what happened is it's really hard to change the actual law in the United States because it requires Congress to actually agree on change. Right now, we have a very divided Congress. What happened is under the Obama administration, they started to look at, well, what kind of policy can we change under the law in order to try to create better, you know, more immigration opportunities. And they did this in a lot of different areas. With the kids, a lot of you might have heard of the Dreamers, they did the same thing. So basically, after back and forth with immigration lawyers, the final rule on entrepreneur parole came out and it basically said that it had these requirements. So if you had $250,000 from a qualified US investor, and that was kind of a complicated thing, like what is a qualified US investor? It's somebody who had made investments in startups previously. So there was some criteria around that, you know, and these other requirements that you— and that you were an important part of the business, you could get this status in the United States. It's very important to understand it's not a visa. It's not an immigration status the way an H-1B visa is. But basically, in my opinion, the people who this would have worked for are people who are in the United States already. Maybe on a student visa, who were kind of like a little bit of a genius who were going to get a whole bunch of funding right out of university and who could be paroled into the United States in this status off the back of maybe a student visa or another visa. It would be a bit weird for someone to come in from the outside and to qualify in all these categories, but it could have been done. Again, a weird status, not not very normal, something that we've used a lot in the humanitarian space, not so much in the business visitor space or the business visa space, but it still was, it was great. The problem is, is it didn't come into effect until the Trump administration came into power. What happened is then the Trump administration didn't follow the proper legal process for terminating the program. So basically, when a law changes or when a policy change happens, you have to— the government has to give the public the opportunity to comment on the policy change and get feedback. And then, you know, so there's like the process that has to be followed. The process was not followed. So then there was a lawsuit. Anyway, it came into effect in January 2018, but everybody knew that the Trump administration wanted to reverse the policy as it had done with all of the other Obama administration immigration policy changes. Finally, it started effective in January. Following proper procedure now, the administration issued a notice to terminate in May with public comment available. I would imagine, I'm not sure exactly how long that process takes, but sometime this year the program will probably terminate. I would proceed with caution. If you have people in the United States who have done this successfully, immigration lawyers, I'd be more than happy to talk to them, you know, on your behalf just to get to suss out whether I think it's legitimate before you spend. It's a lot of money too. The filing fees are enormous. There's probably tons of documentation, especially because nobody really knows what the government wants in terms of adjudicating it, and I just don't my feeling is it's not a long-term solution. Okay, so really sorry about that. Could have been great, and maybe this is something that will come back, you know, in a subsequent administration, you know, in, in, in years from now. But unfortunately, I just don't think it's a solid option. So this one is something that is going to be really hard. So this is another— so this is sort of the first work visa option now. So now you've basically, you've got your, you know, you've got your seed funding from wherever, you're ready to open your US office, and you're ready to start moving yourself or other employees over. The L-1 visa is for intercompany transfers, and for this to work, you have to have an overseas company. So you have to have a foreign entity that you or your employee has been working for at least for the last year or at least one of the last 3 years. And then you have to have a US entity that is a subsidiary or an affiliate, like have at least the same, at least 50% of the same ownership. Okay, so this is again where you want to talk to an immigration lawyer and a tax lawyer because a tax person might have a different, they might say to you, oh my God, whatever you do, don't set up a subsidiary, that's going to mess up all your taxes on your foreign entity. So This is where, you know, this is why I came to PwC because I have a tax person that sits beside me. And when we meet with our clients, we can provide this strategy right there in the room and say, okay, if you want to go the L route, this is why you want to do it, but this is going to be the tax consequences and vice versa. So it's really important to get someone who understands both. So basically, if you do set it up right, what then happens is then you file the petition to US immigration, which remember when I talked about US immigration, things are really tough these days. And they're going to be really hard on an L-1. These are the places where we're seeing huge increases in our requests for evidence, automatic denials before they even audit it now. And it's a lot of paperwork and it's going to be quite expensive. I was charging, you know, like, you know, some people might charge like $4,000 or $5,000 for the professional fees on this. Honestly, that's not worth it for me anymore. It's because it's so much work that I think I'd have to charge even more. It's just the amount of stuff you have to get from you, from the founder and the employee, the amount of documents US immigration is asking for. You know, it's very labor-intensive and the filing fees are going to be at least, you know, all told once you get your visa, it's like $2,000-$3,000 on top of that just on filing fees to the US government. But Then if you have a brand new US business, let's just say the business hasn't been doing any— you opened it in 2018, there's not really been any business happening. If you do an L-1 the first go-around in that first year, the person that starts is only going to get a 1-year visa. Then you have to go through the process again. The second time around, you would be able to get a 3-year visa the second time or a 3-year petition. It's very painful at the beginning, but this might be, depending what country you're from, this might be your only option. What you're going to have to prove is a lot of stuff. This is where it starts to get really tricky because I'm, as your lawyer, I'd be like, okay, Nikki, I need a lease for at least 12 months. I need you to have business contracts. I need you to have prospective clients, you know, all this documentation to prove that the company is actually going to thrive in the United States. But then you say, but, but you told me I'm not allowed to go over and work in the United States. And this is that very delicate dance of being able to go to the United States to set up the business without doing work for the business. So it's all very perspective in terms of thinking about opportunities. But getting enough evidence, like you're going to have to sign a lease to get an L-1. You're going to have to, you know, have real customers in the pipeline. So it's a very delicate dance. And if you can get there, you know, the L, once you get over the first year of the first one-year L and then the second one, you know, this is, this is a great visa to be on. And L is one of the Premier Visas to go on. There's sort of two categories of it. There's people who are managers or executives. So if you're a founder or the, you know, of the business, you're going to probably fit into that category. And then some of your other employees, if you have any, are going to fit into the specialized knowledge. Specialized knowledge is a really hard category to prove because you have to show that the person has very special skills in your business product that is not available sort of in So an L-1B is a really tough category to bring in people with specialized knowledge, but the manager category is probably what all of you as founders would be more likely to fit into. I just want to quickly go back. One of the things that's making— I haven't mentioned— that's making US immigration cases really, really hard is again, a Trump administration executive order called Buy American, Hire American. This happened over a year and a half ago. The Trump administration issued this executive order and what that has been able to do is it's been able to create policy change in the way that the government adjudicates immigration cases using this buy American, hire American mentality. Now when a US immigration officer looks at any case, whether it's an L-1, an O-1, even the consular officers are doing it, when they look at a person coming before them, they say, you know, they're starting to put it in this lens. And this is not what the law says. The law does not require you to test the US labor market in every visa category. But what it's saying is, you know, I'm going to put on this— why are you not buying American goods and hiring American citizens first? So it's just everything is tougher, and that's why. Once you get big enough, I'm not going to spend too much time on this, you can prequalify the company for a blanket petition, which means instead of having to file individual cases to U.S. immigration, you get to go to the U.S. consulate, which we talked about is the gold standard, right? So for most of you, the only way that's going to happen is probably if you hit $25 million in sales. That's going to be the easiest. That's probably a long way off. For most of you, but this is the goal. Just target your sites. If you want to be moving lots of people over, you want to be getting an L-1 blanket. H-1B is probably the one that we hear most of in the immigration parlance because this is the one that most people around the world are fighting for. Let's just say you don't have a foreign entity, you want to hire somebody that hasn't worked for your foreign business so they don't qualify for the L, What you're going to have to do is you're going to have to go into the H-1B lottery. Basically, this means the person— there has to be a US job offer that's professional, a US company, and the person being hired themselves has to be professional. Professional is defined by the US Department of Labor as a job requiring a bachelor's degree or the equivalent. If you don't have a bachelor's degree but you have 12 years of work experience, That can equate to a professional— that can equate to a bachelor's degree. You have to get a third-party evaluator to do it. It can cost like $300 to $500 US for that. But when you do, then you technically would qualify for the H-1B. It makes it harder these days because again, filing to US immigration is tough. They're going to be going over it and being like, well, if this person doesn't have a bachelor's degree, then probably this job doesn't require it. So it's very complicated these to prepare these packages. The other thing is with the H-1B is you can only do it once a year. H-1B cap season is in April. There's a lottery. There's 60,000 of these visas available every year. Employers file for them in April, the first week of April. The quota is usually met. They run a lottery. Those who are successful can start their job on October 1st. Okay, so it's— this is again something that's more catered to, um, you know, employers that are already set up in the United States. There are students, they're on F-1 visas, that they're graduating, uh, they want to hire them right out of school and get them on an H-1B because they're in the U.S. It's a little easier to manage that April to October because they get protection when they're a student. The big thing on an H-1B that you also have to understand is this is— you have to prove there's an employer-employee relationship. If you're 100% owner of the business, that's going to be really hard. Okay, so again, just sort of like flagging issues because I've also been talking a lot and I know we're sort of running out of time. And this is a really important slide. So the questions on the E-2s came up, the E-1 and E-2. So this is just, this is not all the countries that qualify for an E-1 visa. I just put up, you know, a sort of good selection of them of trying to get Europe, Asia, a little bit of the Caribbean and Africa and South America. You're going to have to go onto the internet to look up, go to the actual government's website to see if your country has an E-1 or an E-2 treaty with the United States. E-1, it's for people who are trading goods with the United States, and E-2 is if you're going to invest in the United States. Let's just say you are from— we'll use the UK example because that's the only country where you actually have to— there's a residency requirement. If you're a British national but you live in Hong Kong, you're going to have to get back to London if you want to file an E-2 because there is a residency requirement. Most of these other countries there isn't, but it would be really weird to apply for an E-2 investor visa for as an Aussie if you were in Singapore. That would just be weird. It'd be better to come back to your home country. So there's no— one of the things I hear a lot from my clients is when they talk to an immigration lawyer, they say, yeah, minimum $100,000 investment. And I'm like, well, that's— there's nowhere in the law that says that. The law says that your investment has to be substantial and proportionate. OK, so if the value of the business is only $100,000, then you have to invest the whole $100,000. If the value of the business is $10 million, then you probably only have to invest $1 million. So it's, it's a sliding scale and there's no set price. But obviously, there's going to be a litmus test that every immigration lawyer has as to whether or not they think this is a valid investment. So, you know, for me, I probably wouldn't go less than $75,000 as the investment, but it's going to depend on what it is. If you're buying an existing business and the existing business costs that much money and you have a really solid business plan and it's explaining how you're going to make money out of this business, then it might work. And it depends again, what country are you from, what consulate are you going to be applying for. For an E-2 or an E-1, you have to hire an immigration lawyer who has expertise in the consulate where you're going to apply. And this is where it's critical. So if they don't have any experience working with your country and or any E-2 experience, then you want to find somebody else. It's okay if they've never done one in your country if they're a lawyer that's going to do their research and find out. Because if you've done one, you kind of have done them in others. It's really important that they understand your region, your culture, and what kind of questions the consular officer might be asking. The E-2 requires a lot of documentation, but it's an awesome thing these days given the fact that it's adjudicated at the US consulate. There's no US immigration component. You might get people in the US who want to help you file an E-2 to US immigration and again, I do not recommend that unless there's a very specific reason why you can't physically leave the United States. But don't file stuff to US immigration when there's a, when there's a consular option. It's just not the way the visa was set up. The E-visas were set up for consular adjudication. Speaking of the E, the Aussies are the luckiest people in the whole world when it comes to US immigration. They have an E-3 visa just for Australians, and that is— I actually just realized as a Canadian, I left Canadians off my little slideshow, but anyway, well, so E-3s are for Australian professionals H-1B1s are for Singaporean and Chilean professionals. All three of those countries have the same criteria. The H-1B1s are carved out of that, of the cap. Most Singaporeans and Chileans can just go straight to their consulate and apply for an H-1B1 visa. They have to meet the same requirements as an H-1B. It's a two-step process. Again, it's going to be adjudicated overseas, so it's obviously way better. For all of these ones, you have to also be careful. There does have to be an employer-employee relationship. And I think for a long time Aussies have gotten away with the idea that this is an entrepreneur visa. It is not. You have to prove that you are an employee of the US business, even if you're the 100% owner. The way you do that is by having a board of directors or something that can show that the, the business is bigger than you. I forgot to put Canadians on here. It's been a while since I did a TN visa. A TN is a visa just for Canadian professionals, but unfortunately for Canada, their treaty is just not as good as the— some of the other treaties because it limits the number of professions. So you have to fit into one of the boxes, and this is actually a personal story. When I was deciding where to go to graduate school in the United States, I was a Canadian citizen, lawyer was on the list, and that's why I went to law school. That's how bad I wanted to stay in the United States. I mean, I did want to be a lawyer, but, you know, it put me into a box. Sorry, I'm burning through these, but I just want to make sure we end on time. So the O-1 is for people of extraordinary ability, whether you're an athlete, actor, businessperson, or scientist or researcher. This is going to lend well to people who have had a startup career and potentially already sold something successfully and are now onto their second or third endeavor. The O-1 is very much for people who have a public profile. So if you're slaving away in secret R&D and you're going to debut some amazing, you know, product, but nobody knows about it, the O-1 is not going to work for you. You do have the US person sponsor you, so you have to have an agent or a company or an employer sponsor you. So you can't sponsor yourself, but you can have this idea of an agent. So I do a lot of them with, with an agent, and that allows you to work for multiple people. But it's, you know, there's, there's a— this is very document heavy. It's going to be very expensive. But it ends up being a 3-year visa, which is great. I just, the thing I always tell people is don't shy away from this extraordinary ability category. I do a lot of O-1 visas. It's up to the lawyer to tell you honestly whether they think you have a valid case, and it's going to be very much on what evidence you can give to the lawyer to show that you are extraordinary, and there's a whole bunch of different things that you can hit off target. Okay, we've already talked about the H-1B one, so I won't go into that. Let me just see what I have left. Okay, yeah, my last little tips. We have 5 minutes left. Pay for good advice, especially on the tax side, because, you know, if you get it wrong, my problem is I see a lot of, you know, people who've been successful. They've got to the United States. They've now got a few employees. And everything is a total disaster because the immigration, you know, they've got good immigration advice, but they haven't got good tax advice. They don't know how they're running payroll. They don't, you know, the founder didn't get individual tax advice. So spend your money on good strategic advice. I know you don't have it. But, you know, we're like, one of the things we're doing at PwC is trying to create sort of like more templated products for startups so that they're off the shelf. And then, you know, you can select a menu of like additional advice. And then, and we also work with a lot of advisors to help them implement it. So, find those kind of people. Okay. Always have your government hat on. So, just remember, you know, you're speaking the US government's language, whether you're dealing with the consulate, the Department of Labor, US immigration, or Customs and Border Patrol protection. You need to be thinking like a US government official. Okay. And the last thing, and I, you know, sort of more like this is not immigration advice. This is my worldly advice at my, you know, non-entrepreneur age stage. But basically, you know, use your home country, right? Use it for all it's worth. You know, maximize your success. Take every opportunity. I never say no to anything. And I tell my clients, don't say no. Because all of that stuff that you do in your home country, a good immigration lawyer will be able to find a place to use it in your immigration case later on. Okay. Sorry, I spent 2 minutes ago.

It's okay. Actually, there's a few questions here in the chat room that I'd love to get to. Ruben asked, he's thinking about potentially attending an accelerator in US. It's a 4-month program. It's on a B-1 instead of an H-3, and he would like to bring his spouse and his 2 kids. What kind of visa would, would he need to get for them?

So that's a great question, really critical, and especially if you want the kids to be going to school. So if they're babies, then not so much of an issue. You would get B-2 tourist visas for your spouse and the children, and you would all go in together. So My recommendation is everyone books their visa interviews and goes in together. Even though the B-2 and the B-1 you have to technically apply for separately, try to book them at the same time and everyone goes to the window together and the consular officer then can adjudicate everyone at the same time. That's my recommendation. But if the kids are at school age and you want them to be actually going to public school in the United States, they are going to have to get an annotation on their visa label that says they're allowed to go to school. You probably want to talk to an immigration lawyer because you want to make sure you carefully plan that out and you have all the language correct because the children of a B are only allowed to go to school in specific categories. You are going to have to get that B-1 in lieu of H-3 visa in order for your kids to be allowed to go to school, to public school. Now, caveat that with, technically in the United States, public schools are supposed to take money from foreigners to send their kids to school, but it depends on where you are. California doesn't seem like they do that. Other states, they might do that. So there's a lot of like more practical things that you're gonna have to sort out if they're gonna be going to school.

Another question here is, are there quotas for O-1s and what's the time frame on the applications there?

There's no quota on the O-1. The O-1, like I said, they're getting harder so we're seeing a lot more requests for evidence. The timeline, it depends. O-1, the same with L-1, you can pay for what we call premium processing. Premium processing is an additional $1,225 US filing fee that you pay in order for US immigration to adjudicate your case in 15 days. There's pros and cons to using premium processing. Sometimes what'll happen is they use it as a time management tool. On day 14, if your case is not adjudicated, they simply issue a request for evidence on your case, which sucks because you may not have got one had you not submitted premium processing. It's just too hard to know. Premium processing is just better, especially if you're going to get a request for evidence. It gets faxed to your lawyer. You can start working on it rather than waiting for mail. If you file regular processing with an O, typically the processing time is about 3 months. If you have time and you don't want to spend another— that's a lot of money to file that additional filing fee, especially because an O-1 is going to be quite expensive on the legal fees because it's a lot of work gathering all the documents.

All right. It's funny, you know, when we get to the end of the webinar, you know, all these new questions start coming in. I'm going to ask one more question and this is the last one here. Uh, you know, um, you know, it says— I'm going to read it, but look, Christian, you're going to have to go back and watch this because Nikki did cover some of the parameters taken into account for L-1. But, you know, he, he, he basically has a company that is incorporated both in the US and his home country. What is the right time to apply for, you know, an L-1 visa?

Well, you know, so if the company has been doing business in the United States without you for at least 1 year, then the nice thing is that you can— let me just turn— it's been doing business in the United States for at least 1 year, then you might want to wait for you to apply for the L-1 until after that year ticks by so that you're going to get a 3-year L. So that would be one strategy if you can. But that's only if you have people in the US that are doing the work and the company's actually— because you're going to have to prove that it's been actively doing business for that year. So if you can get to that place, it just depends on the business. If there is people in the US doing work for you, if you have salespeople and you can show that kind of stuff, then great. Wait the 1-year tick and then apply. Otherwise, it's going to be just what does your lawyer think? Like, how much evidence do you have? Because These days, it's almost inevitable that you're going to get a request for evidence, but I wouldn't say— so then there's like some lawyers are going, well, let's just hold a little bit back and then we'll file, we'll get the request for evidence, and then we'll hone in. But what they've decided to do in one of the most recent policy changes is they're just issuing denials right away, no request for evidence. You have to give them 100% of your best work at the very beginning, and that's really hard for my clients. I always get what I want after a Request for Evidence. So I'm telling you, when the lawyer says give you XYZ, you give it to them. You dig, you spend the time, because I know you're busy, but I— it just astounds me. Every single L-1 case I submit that gets a Request for Evidence, my clients always give me what I asked for. 6 months before. So, so just take the time to find it. You don't understand what they're asking for, a phone call is really important. And I think I, even me, I will tend to try to be document-driven and email-driven. The second I get on the phone and understand the business, I'm like, oh my God, yeah, yeah, let's use that piece. So a lot of times it's just we're just speaking different languages. And if you can figure out how to teach your lawyer what it is you're actually doing as a business, because think about it, like Every business is so unique. Teach them about what you're doing, and then if they're good, they're going to be able to creatively think, ah, that piece of evidence, that's what I normally use. That's going to be great.

Awesome. Well, look, on that note, I just want to personally thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to educate us like this. For everyone else in the chat room, we've recorded this. So if you were probably going to want to go back and rewatch this because it was really, really good. A lot of detailed information. Nikki, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. This was really, really great.

You're welcome. I wish you all the best. And, you know, anyone that has any questions, feel free to email me. And, you know, I can either connect you to a colleague or, you know, see if I can help you or even just like, you know, whatever, whatever you need. I love working with I love working with founders, so thank you so much for having me.

Alright, thank you so much. Have a good rest of your day and thank you everyone.

Take care.

Thank you everyone who jumped on. Alright, goodbye.

Bye.