Living here in Texas, we often hear about immigration, and the laws and changes that are occurring in the laws, especially the hot-button issues. Arizona ring a bell, anyone? As you know in the hospitality industry, especially you hotel folks, immigration is an issue for you, whether you are considering moving employees between or among international properties, or you are looking to hire people that might not be full-fledged citizens of the United States. Immigration is a somewhat broad area of the law, and today I’m giving you a short listing of the types of visas about which you most need to know.
Do these designations sound familiar: J-1, H-3, L-1, TN and H-1B? For some of you, I am sure they do. The J-1 visa is for seasonal or temporary employment, known as the Summer Work/Travel Program. It allows foreign secondary (college) students to work in the U.S. during a summer vacation, and is valid for four months. I had discussions with a restaurant employee who was here last summer working via a J-1 visa, who traveled from Asia. He was studying engineering. What? What does that have to do with a restaurant? The answer is . . . NOTHING! A J-1 visa allows students to do any type of work in roughly any company, even if the work or company is unrelated to the student’s area of study or degree plan. This can be beneficial for hotel and restaurant operations, catering companies too, in high tourism areas, such as the Florida coast, when certain months of the year require higher numbers of employees to deal with the increased traveler traffic. It also makes it easier, and legal, if you are a foreign student staying in a coastal town (for example) for a few months to get a job and earn some money to help pay for your travel expenses and lodging.
Another classification of the J-1 visa is the Management Trainee. It is valid for twelve to eighteen months and is generally considered relatively easy to obtain by my friends who practice only immigration law. To qualify, the foreigner must possess a post-secondary degree or professional certificate and one year of work experience in their occupational field from outside of the U.S. That means work experience here in the US does not count. As an alternative, an applicant for the J-1 Management Trainee visa could have five years of work experience in the particular occupational field in place of the requirement of a post-secondary degree or professional certificate.
The H-3 visa is available to companies with an already established training program. They can last up to two years. It is similar to a J-1 visa, but it can last longer, the training sought cannot be available to the foreigner in his/her home country, and the training must benefit the person in pursuing a career outside the U.S. The H-3 visa can be a valuable tool for international hotels seeking to train foreign employees in certain areas where training is simply not available in their own country. That foreign employee can then return to their home country (or another country) and work for the hotel company having received the training he/she could only obtain here. Worth considering for a good, long-term, hiring prospect from a foreign country.
There are also visa classifications that are catered to the more high-level, more highly educated employees, such as managerial employees, employees possessing specialized knowledge, and employees who provide professional services. Those visas are the L-1 Intracompany Transfer, TN Hotel Manager and the H-1B Specialty Occupation classifications. The L-1 classification is available for individuals who have been working with a company for more than one year outside the U.S. in an executive, managerial, or specialized knowledge capacity. L-1 visas are usually valid for an initial period of three years, but can be extended up to a maximum of seven years for executives and managers, or a maximum of five years for specialized knowledge employees.
There is also the option of a TN Hotel Manager classification, although the TN classification is only available to citizens of the US and Mexico. (It arose out of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, thus the limitation to US and Mexico). It is valid for three years and can be extended indefinitely. To obtain a TN Hotel Manager visa, the person must have a bachelor’s degree in hotel/restaurant management or a post-secondary diploma or certificate in the same area and three years’ worth of experience in the particular field.
Finally, there is the somewhat controversial and often mentioned H1-B visa, for specialty occupations. Some of my clients have employees with H1-B visas. The numbers are limited to 65,000 visas available to employers in the US per fiscal year (starting October 1), so advance planning is crucial. My experience has always been that there are far more applications for the H1-B visas than are available. To obtain an H1-B visa, the person must have at least a Bachelor’s Degree or the equivalent. The visa is usually valid for three years, and one three-year extension is available.
This is just a very simple glimpse at the landscape, as anyone who has dealt with these visas knows. However, they can be valuable tools in dealing with employment issues and recruiting for those of you who have international businesses or who simply want to legally employ persons who are not US citizens.
If you have questions, please feel free to contract me! If I can’t answer your question, I know people who can.
