Articles Posted in International Clients and Foreign-Owned Businesses

Short answer. Most of what our E-2 clients do is not a securities transaction at all. Buy the assets of a business, or form and actively control your own company, and no security changes hands. Buy the stock of an existing corporation and you have bought a security even at one hundred percent, but a…

Short answer. Buying an operating business is often the strongest E-2 fact pattern available. The enterprise is already real, the financials already exist, and the purchase price supplies a clean number for the proportionality test. But four deal terms decide whether the petition works: how the acquisition is financed, whether you buy assets or stock,…

Short answer. E-2 is not a dual intent category, so every renewal interview is a place where a pending immigrant petition has to be explained. E-1 and E-2 are not on the list of classifications that can travel abroad with a pending I-485 and return in status, so one trip forces a choice between abandoning…

Short answer. An E-2 owner has three realistic employment-based routes, and two of them skip labor certification entirely. EB-1C for a multinational manager or executive requires no PERM. EB-2 with a national interest waiver is a self-petition with no job offer and no ability-to-pay test. EB-3 or standard EB-2 through PERM requires your own company…

Short answer. Being a national of a treaty country is one of several nationality questions in an E-2 case. The company must also have treaty nationality, your country may be under an entry restriction, some countries appear with an expiration date attached, a passport bought through an investment program may not count for three years,…

Short answer. An EB-5 petition is a documentary case. Nobody testifies. An officer reads a record and decides whether your claim is probably true. Below is every exhibit, in the order the file is actually built. Get the source of funds tracker. A one-page working document: every exhibit a source of funds file needs, with…

Short answer. No universal right time. Three things decide it: where you are chargeable, how old your children are, and whether you need regional center grandfathering. Two dates make this year different. September 30, 2026 and January 1, 2027. Which of these three is you? The rest of this page is three worked situations. Start…

Immigration rules, fees, and procedures are changing frequently; confirm current requirements before acting. Consider a composite of situations I encounter regularly. A founder from a treaty country forms a Texas LLC through a ninety-nine-dollar filing website in an afternoon. For convenience, ownership is split casually with a U.S.-based cousin who will “help with the bank…

A standard American estate plan quietly assumes everyone and everything is in the United States. For international families, that assumption fails in expensive ways. Cross-border planning requires attention to U.S. and foreign tax law, beneficiary designations that may not work across jurisdictions, FBAR and FATCA reporting for U.S. persons with foreign accounts, and applicable treaty…