TN Status

As a Cana­dian cit­izen who does some work for cus­tom­ers in the U.S., I needed to get some form of leg­al status for busi­ness trips there. For Cana­dians trav­el­ling tem­por­ar­ily, TN status is the easi­est if you qual­i­fy. Here­with a few notes on my exper­i­ence of the procedure.

I haven’t found out what “TN” actu­ally stands for, if any­thing; it’s defined as the “Pro­fes­sion­als Under the North Amer­ic­an Free Trade Agree­ment” cat­egory in the U.S. State Depart­ment doc­u­ment­a­tion. Des­pite being part of NAFTA, it’s dif­fer­ent for Cana­dians and Mex­ic­ans in a num­ber of ways. For Cana­dian con­sult­ants who have cus­tom­ers in the U.S. that they need to vis­it, it is rel­at­ively easy and quick. You need to go through the pro­ced­ure for each cus­tom­er though, as the cat­egory seems to have been designed for people who are going to work for a single com­pany for a tem­por­ary peri­od (max­im­um one year). To make up for hav­ing to renew the status every year, you can renew it as often as you like.

The biggest draw­back is that you can­’t apply for TN status until you are trav­el­ling to the work site. I found this out the hard way by tak­ing my doc­u­ment­a­tion to the bor­der a couple of days before trav­el­ling to the meet­ing, and got turned back. So in these days of non-refund­able plane tick­ets, err on the side of tak­ing too much doc­u­ment­a­tion rather than too little.

Ah yes, the doc­u­ment­a­tion you need. The site quoted above used to say: 

1. A request for “TN” status;
2. A copy of the applic­ant’s col­lege degree and employ­ment records which estab­lish qual­i­fic­a­tion for the pro­spect­ive job;
3. A let­ter from the ali­en’s pro­spect­ive U.S.-based employ­er offer­ing him or her a job in the United States, which is included on the pro­fes­sion­al job series (NAFTA list); and
4. A fee of U.S. $50.00.

The request is verbal (i.e., you apply at the immig­ra­tion desk by say­ing some­thing like “I want to apply for TN status”); the US $50 has to be exact change (although they do take cred­it cards), so that leaves the let­ter and the proof of qualification.

I found a sample let­ter, no longer avail­able, it used to be at http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/oie/admins/notebook2/sample2.pdf, with an aca­dem­ic bent, since it was linked to from the http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/oie/admins/notebook2/other3.cfm (Oth­er Work Cat­egor­ies) page at Carne­gie Mel­lon’s web site for the Office of Inter­na­tion­al Education.

That leaves the rest of the sup­port­ing doc­u­ments — I took cop­ies of the con­tract, and any­thing I could find to prove I ful­filled the require­ments of the “Man­age­ment Con­sult­ant” job spe­cific­a­tion (uni­ver­sity degrees, pre­vi­ous job offers, let­ters of recom­mend­a­tion, any­thing that matched any part of the con­tract). I have no idea how much of all of that was neces­sary, since they send you out of the room while they read it all and make their decision. 

Every­one was busi­ness-like (it prob­ably helped that there was no queue for the sec­ond­ary pro­cessing area). The offi­cial in the first immig­ra­tion queue (where you first ask for the TN status) thought that TN might not be appro­pri­ate and muttered some­thing about a busi­ness visa. This had me wor­ried, since I assume a busi­ness visa takes longer to get, and has to be applied for in advance. Obvi­ously the doc­u­ment­a­tion was con­sidered suf­fi­cient and appro­pri­ate, since 30 minutes and $US 50 later I was on the way to the con­fer­ence selec­tion meet­ing with a TN status card stapled to my passport.