About the L-1B Classification
The L-1B nonimmigrant classification enables a U.S. employer to transfer a professional employee with specialized knowledge relating to the organization’s interests from one of its affiliated foreign offices to one of its offices in the United States. This classification also enables a foreign company that does not yet have an affiliated U.S. office to send a specialized knowledge employee to the United States to help establish one.
Learn More on the USCIS website!
How Can a Business Plan for an L-1B Application Help?
A business plan provides for a single-document presentation of the evidence that the Intracompany Transferee meets the requirements per USCIS guidelines, enhancing the submission for the L-1B visa. A business plan prepared by Polaris Business Consulting presents its narrative in a sensible flow from beginning to end, which clearly showcases how the foreign and domestic companies as well as the applicant/beneficiary meet all requirements. Polaris’s business plans also go that extra mile to present market and financial analyses of the domestic enterprise in order to provide support for the business’s operational feasibility.
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General Qualifications of the Employer and Employee
To qualify for L-1 classification in this category, the employer must:
- Have a qualifying relationship with a foreign company (parent company, branch, subsidiary, or affiliate, collectively referred to as qualifying organizations); AND
- Currently be, or will be, doing business as an employer in the United States and in at least one other country directly or through a qualifying organization for the duration of the beneficiary’s stay in the United States as an L-1. While the business must be viable, there is no requirement that it be engaged in international trade.
Doing business means the regular, systematic, and continuous provision of goods and/or services by a qualifying organization and does not include the mere presence of an agent or office of the qualifying organization in the United States and abroad.
To qualify, the named employee must also:
- Generally 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 services in a specialized knowledge capacity to a branch of the same employer or one of its qualifying organizations.
Specialized knowledge means either special knowledge possessed by an individual of the petitioning organization’s product, service, research, equipment, techniques, management, or other interests and its application in international markets, or an advanced level of knowledge or expertise in the organization’s processes and procedures.
L-1 Visa Reform Act of 2004
The L-1 Visa Reform Act of 2004 applies to all petitions filed on or after June 6, 2005, and is directed particularly to those filed on behalf of L-1B employees who will be stationed primarily at the worksite of an of an employer other than the petitioning employer or its affiliate, subsidiary, or parent. In order for the employee to qualify for L-1B classification in this situation, the petitioning employer must show that:
- The employee will not be principally controlled or supervised by such an unaffiliated employer; and
- The work being provided by the employee is not considered to be labor for hire by such an unaffiliated employer.
New Offices
For foreign employers seeking to send an employee with specialized knowledge to the United States to be employed in a qualifying new office, the employer must show that:
- The employer has secured sufficient physical premises to house the new office ; and
- The employer has the financial ability to compensate the employee and begin doing business in the United States.