Practice area
Business Immigration
Businesses in the US must often navigate complex procedures to employ foreign nationals. Elizabeth focuses on obtaining government approvals in a creative and timely manner, fully mindful of the resources a business actually has.
Chapter 01
What the employer has to establish, and who assembles it
An employment petition is an argument made in documents. The government is not asking whether the company likes the candidate. It is asking the company to establish that the role is real, that it genuinely requires what the company says it requires, and that this particular person meets it. Those are three separate propositions and each one is proved with different paper.
In practice that means job descriptions written before the petition rather than after it, organisational detail that matches what the company files elsewhere, and credential evidence for the employee that a stranger can follow without knowing the industry. Elizabeth works out which of those the company already has, which need to be produced, and who inside the business is actually going to produce them, because a petition stalls far more often on a missing internal document than on a point of law.
Closed case folders and a glass of water on a meeting table in slatted morning light
Fitting the filing to the company's own hiring calendar
Employers do not experience immigration as a legal question. They experience it as a start date. The useful work is therefore backwards from the date the company needs somebody at a desk, through the agency's own queues and windows, to the point where the file has to be assembled.
Some categories have fixed filing seasons and some do not. Some can be filed at a consulate abroad and some cannot. Where a company has a choice, the choice usually trades money against time, and it should be made deliberately with the real dates in front of everybody rather than discovered afterwards. Elizabeth's brief here is to make that timing visible early, while the company can still act on it.
Chapter 03
Where employer filings stall, and what prevents it
The common failure is not refusal. It is a request for more evidence arriving months in, asking for something that could have been included at the start, and costing the company the very weeks it was trying to protect. Requests of that kind are usually predictable from the shape of the file.
The defence is unglamorous: anticipate what the officer is likely to find thin, and answer it in the original filing rather than in a response. That takes longer up front and it is the thing that most often keeps a start date intact. No filing is immune, and nobody can promise an approval, but a file built to survive the obvious question generally does.
Working inside the resources the business actually has
A fifteen person company and a multinational do not have the same immigration budget, the same HR function, or the same tolerance for a process that consumes a manager for a month. Elizabeth's own description of this work is that she obtains approvals in a creative and timely manner while being fully mindful of the available resources, and that phrase is doing real work.
It means saying when a cheaper route is genuinely available, when a more expensive one is worth it, and when the honest answer is that the category the company hoped for does not fit the role it has described. Clients have written publicly about H-1B petitions, PERM applications, E visas for owners and managers, and TN and L-1 transfers among the matters handled here.
Streefland Law. Licensed in Minnesota and before the federal immigration agencies and courts. Call (612) 789-0379.