TN
That U.S. opportunity is worth a conversation. Explore professional work through the TN pathway.
For the next job. The bold idea. The life you can already picture.
U.S. visa support for Canadians
ready for what’s next.
Hypothetical example: three Nashwaak households are asking about the United States in the same season for entirely different reasons. A registered nurse at a rural health centre has an offer from a critical-access hospital; a maple co-packing company wants to send its general manager to a new U.S. subsidiary; and a couple who sold an independent pharmacy are weighing an investment large enough to move the whole family. Each of those is a question about one particular person, and the answer to any one of them tells you almost nothing useful about the other two.
This page sets out six routes: TN professional entry, L-1A managerial or executive transfer, L-1B specialized-knowledge transfer, E-2 treaty investment, EB-5 immigrant investment and the official Gold Card process. They are not ranked, and none of them is a general permission for a family to move. Each attaches to an individual and asks a different question about that individual: what he is qualified to do, who has employed him and for how long, what he owns and controls, or what he is prepared to commit and lose. A household usually contains more than one answer, because a spouse and a child are assessed on their own facts rather than carried along by the principal's. Begin by listing the people, then read the six summaries below.
Choose what brings you here. Leave with a short list of things to discuss—not another long form to fill out.
A listed profession sets its own qualification, and the state that regulates the work sets another one entirely.

Status belongs to a person, never to a family or a company, and holding on to that one idea prevents most of the disappointments in this area. A professional route depends on the applicant's own citizenship and credential, and a spouse gains nothing from it beyond a dependent status with its own hard limits. A company transfer depends on one employee's own year of employment abroad, not on the employer's long history. An immigrant investment covers a spouse and unmarried children under twenty-one, and stops there. Write out every member of the household with a date of birth, a citizenship, a current status and an intention, then ask what each of them would be permitted to do on the day the plan takes effect. The gaps show up immediately.
Meet the people in your cornerPersonal support.
A practical plan.
No promises we can’t keep.
Write down every member of the household with a date of birth, a citizenship, a current status and what they intend to do in the United States. Most routes are eliminated by that single page, before any research begins.
Take each adult separately and identify the conditions they could plausibly meet: a listed profession, a qualifying year of employment, ownership and control of a business, or committed capital. Nobody qualifies by association with somebody else.
For each candidate route, name the condition most likely to fail and check that one now: a credential that is not the one listed, a year of employment that is not continuous, capital that is not yet liquid.
Decide what has to happen in what order — licence, corporate filing, escrow, evidence — and only afterwards choose start dates. Dates fixed before the sequence is understood are the usual cause of a rushed and weakened file.
If employment is seasonal, shift-based or spread across more than one employer, the record is not unreliable merely for that reason, provided it is complete. Seasonal layoffs, records of employment, a winter month on a different payroll and a spring of long overtime are facts that documents can explain. What causes trouble is a tidy summary written years afterwards that the payroll does not support. Pull the actual slips, registers and employment records first and let them describe the working year as it happened, interruptions included. An explained gap costs a paragraph; an unexplained inconsistency can cause a request for evidence and delay.
Find your pathwayShneur Herman, Jo Kubti and Alexander Paton work through files remotely, reading documents rather than descriptions of documents. There is no office to attend and no local appointment to arrange, which suits households working shifts or living a long drive from anywhere. Questions are answered against the wording of the rule, and where a plan will not work you will be told so plainly rather than sold a longer process. Where a household has several possible routes, expect the conversation to begin with the people involved and their dates, because those facts usually eliminate more options than any amount of strategy does.
Let’s connectArrange a remote consultation to discuss your next steps.
Every route here admits a spouse and unmarried children under twenty-one as dependants, but what they may then do differs sharply. On some routes the spouse may work; on others nobody but the principal may. Children may study in every case, and may not work in any temporary category.
It depends on which rule is being applied. A company transfer requires a continuous full-time year with a qualifying employer, and a seasonal pattern has to be examined against that wording. A professional position is judged on the offer rather than on a past pattern of work. Bring the payroll records either way.
No. File review and consultations are remote and documents are exchanged electronically. A first conversation is often most useful before documents are gathered, because its main purpose is to identify which of them will actually matter.
No category is easier in the abstract; each is easier for particular facts. The route that fits is the one whose conditions your own documents already satisfy, or could satisfy within a period you can name. Choosing by reputation rather than by fit wastes the most time.
Editorial source review: 2026-09-07.
Tell us where you are today.
Let’s talk about where you want to go.