Small US Business Sponsoring Jordanian and Romanian Employees?

[Carhole]

Howdy,

Has anyone here dealt with the US .gov on acquiring work or immigration visas for overseas employees particularly from the two countries of Romania and Jordan? The application process seems fairly straightforward though when evaluating a short business plan with foreign nationals as part of milestones, it is getting foggy for me to make predictions and hash out branches of operations surrounding people with pending petitions.

I’m particularly seeking some anecdata from other employers who’ve successfully navigated this process and who’ve sponsored E3s:

1. Professionals are members of the professions whose jobs require at least a baccalaureate degree from a U.S. university or college or its foreign equivalent degree.

From Immigrant visas for Romanians at us .gov site here. this seems preferable to work visas where we’d be revisiting the process and pushing for extensions. That seems particularly stress-inducing for all parties involved and my potential hires would prefer full immigration.

If you have any tips to share I am all ears:

Business class is aerospace, commercial. Startup is less than one year old and under ten employees, however we will need to grow to remain a SB at a bit under fifty total employees within the US. Getting two people onboarded from overseas are the immediate plans for expanding international diversity and as of now we do not foresee the need to budget for sponsoring more workers from these areas. We may focus on Norway and Indonesia next, though that’s down the growth pipeline a ways.

Thanks in advance for your input.

 

[MilleniX]

All I'll say is that you should plan to spend a lot of money on immigration attorneys, to make sure all the paperwork and processing is done exactly right. Applications can end up getting denied for stupid, insubstantial reasons. If you're not working with attorneys with dedicated experience in the immigration process, you'll be wasting your and your (prospective?) employees' time.

 

[Carhole]

All I'll say is that you should plan to spend a lot of money on immigration attorneys, to make sure all the paperwork and processing is done exactly right. Applications can end up getting denied for stupid, insubstantial reasons. If you're not working with attorneys with dedicated experience in the immigration process, you'll be wasting your and your (prospective?) employees' time.

Thanks, I’ve read that it’s very common for petitions to fail for this very reason that you mention of form completion/standards adherence in the first shot. One must also not be in a hurry when expecting results. I’ve read to budget for around four thousand USD per employee. Have you experienced grotesquely blown out immigration billable hours or mentioning this as a general precaution? It seems like good advice to have a legal consult handle the whole process. Dollars well spent as it were.

 

[hanser]

All I'll say is that you should plan to spend a lot of money on immigration attorneys, to make sure all the paperwork and processing is done exactly right. Applications can end up getting denied for stupid, insubstantial reasons. If you're not working with attorneys with dedicated experience in the immigration process, you'll be wasting your and your (prospective?) employees' time.

This is the answer.

My wife was an immigration paralegal for nearly ten years, working at a well-known firm in MA. Most immigration attorneys charge a flat fee per application. Sometimes they sail through, sometimes they get hung up. Often the hangups amount to the immigration official being petty. Sometimes it's more substantial. All of it is a time sink.

This is the kind of thing you just pay to have someone else do. More complicated cases may require more than the flat fee, but emigrating professionals is pretty bread-and-butter for most firms. (Asylum and refugee cases are considerably more complicated and time consuming.)

There's a high probability of failure if you go it alone. If you don't fail outright, it can still take years due to delays. The other advantage specialists have is knowing how to work the system. Who the local players are, and how to work around roadblocks. You're not going to be able to learn that by reading text on a webpage.

 

[AgentQ]

Pre-COVID my employer had a lot of international employees. The legal team was getting good at dealing with immigration requests and we helped several people come to the US from several countries over the years.

Romania was one of the countries where they didn't even want to hire people as remote employees for some reason. I don't know the details, but for our people in Romania the only option they were willing to support was an independent contractor arrangement.

It was tough because we found some really great devs in Romania.

 

[Megalodon]

One of the big issues is they generally hit the H-1B limit every year so there's a lottery. You're not guaranteed to get someone in even if they're eligible and there's no problems with their application. I can't say for sure what visa you'd be aiming for but from your description it sounds like H-1B.

 

[Carhole]

One of the big issues is they generally hit the H-1B limit every year so there's a lottery. You're not guaranteed to get someone in even if they're eligible and there's no problems with their application. I can't say for sure what visa you'd be aiming for but from your description it sounds like H-1B.

Yeah, this seems to be a bit of a chaotic unknown as you mention: a lottery as it seems that the Professional groups get about 28% of work visas per year, as competition for the more specialized tiers seems fairly fierce. It’d be extremely frustrating to incur a legal expense and to also have a prospective partner or employee get set back for an extra cycle or two.

My brother went through a naturalization nightmare with getting his wife in from Brazil but very different case, similar bureaucratics at work.

 

[Megalodon]

Yeah, this seems to be a bit of a chaotic unknown as you mention: a lottery as it seems that the Professional groups get about 28% of work visas per year, as competition for the more specialized tiers seems fairly fierce. It’d be extremely frustrating to incur a legal expense and to also have a prospective partner or employee get set back for an extra cycle or two.

My brother went through a naturalization nightmare with getting his wife in from Brazil but very different case, similar bureaucratics at work.

I was very fortunate to be able to use a TN (only available within NAFTA) so I could start work while I waited for H-1B. TN is non-immigrant intent so it's highly dodgy to attempt a green card application. And TN doesn't allow you to change jobs without crossing the border, and whenever you do that you risk not getting back in. It was a real pain. But at least it wasn't a lottery so as long as you got your application in on the first day you were very likely fine to get an H-1B.

When I did my naturalization it was easy enough I didn't even use a lawyer. I think out of everything the PERM stuff for employment-based green card was the most involved.