Can H1B holder work for Canadian company remotely?

I am on H1B visa in US.

I am planning to open a business under my name in Canada and start doing online consulting work.

I have some US client also lined up, which need my consulting services.

All the client will be paying directly to the my canadian business.

Is this situation allowed with H1B visa?

Thanks for your help in advance.

You cannot perform any non-employee work for US clients while on H1. You can get multiple H1's for these clients, if they hire you as an employee and get I-129 approval.

You could, under narrow circumstances, do consulting work for NON-US clients, as long as they had no US affiliations and neither you nor they were benefiting from your location in US. This would be true in almost any non-immigration status (TN/TD/H1/H4, etc).

But to do consulting work for anyone in US would be unauthorized and violate your H1. the fact that they would be paying you thru a Cdn company is unimportant.

The best that this US client could do is hire you as an H1 employee, by filing their own I-129 on your behalf, requesting H1 sponsorship.

Alternatively, you could have your current emoployer switch you to TN, and then have youtr other US clients EACH sponsor you on TN.

But I doubt that your current H1 employer/sponsor would go for such blatant moonlighting.

You could, under narrow circumstances, do consulting work for NON-US clients, as long as they had no US affiliations and neither you nor they were benefiting from your location in US. This would be true in almost any non-immigration status (TN/TD/H1/H4, etc).

I just wanted to ask you to clarify if in my situation I'll be able to work remotely for a canadian hospital (so no US affiliations), while I'm living in US on TD visa (TN dependant).
I've read a lot of different information about this. I'm a Canadian citizen.

As I said, so long as neithr you nor the Cdn employer is benefitting from you physically being in the US, such work should not violate your current US status.

You would want to get this confirmed by a lwayer.

Agnelson, is there a specific real-life example that can actually prove that a Canadian can work remotely for a Canadian client while being on TN/H1B in the US? I fully agree with you on that one, however, there are tons of people on different forums who do not. They consider this type of work as violation of non-immigrant status that can lead to I-485 denial.
The reason I am asking is because I am in the same situation. The company just applied for GC for me and on the G-235a form I listed the Canadian experience ending in 2008, at that time I was already in the US. However, no work was done for this client from US, most of the work was done before I moved to US in 2006 anyway. But the CIS may view this employment range as continuous self-employed employee-employer relationship and consider it violation of my status. I really worry about this part. Any ideas, suggestions?

I think you will be fine. The USCIS employees working on the green cards have other more pressing concerns when processing the application. My wife and I received our employment-based green cards this July. I was absolutely paranoid about every little detail on the application, and then we got a RFE asking to prove our marriage was bona fide and provide long-form birth certificates - obviously, this made the paranoia worse! When we did respond, I accidentally misdated one of the photos of my wife and I together - I lost sleep the night after I sent it in because I thought they would think I was lying to them since I said on the photo we were in the US when she was still in Canada. I didn't realize how ridiculous this was until I discovered all people married for less than 2 years get an automatic RFE; five days after sending in the photos we were approved.

I guess my point is don't waste time worrying about this; as bad as the stories about USCIS can be, they don't usually go out of their way to cause you problems. Tracking down this problem would require an epic feat in detective work (would need to spot problem in first place, then check Canadian tax returns, then access your immigration history and somehow demonstrate that you did this work while in the US, then demonstrate that this work benefited from your presence in the US, and then set a legal precedent on the very tricky issue of working remotely). And as agnelson points out, since the whole working remotely for a foreign company thing is a legal gray area to begin with, the USCIS agent would have to go to all this effort without any clear reason to pursue it to begin with! My own green card experience was EB2, took two weeks to get I-140 approved and then 4 months for the green card. Never sent in any tax information (some legal firms insist on doing this, but USCIS doesn't ask for them specifically on the 485 form), got maybe 5 LUDs on the green card - one for first processing, one after fingerprinting, one for the RFE, and then two after receiving that before approval. They probably looked at my file 5 times. I looked at it that many times in the post office before sending it off Everything they wanted was just technical, clearly part of a checklist they use on all cases. Again, I think you will be fine.

Thanks a lot, Deaton333 and congrats with your new greencards!! Really appreciate your response, it actually does make sense what you say and inspire some hope for me... I asked the same questions on different forums, and the feedback was pretty negative which was kind of frustrating to read. The irony of the situation is that I never even got paid for my work, the paid lunch in a restaurant back in 2006 does not count, I guess . All I just did was creating a website for a friend of mine who owns a retirement business in Canada, and the work was done by me before moving to the US. She is a good friend of mine and it was my pleasure to help her with her start-up business, plus it was an easy thing to do since I work as a programmer. Later she asked me to update it a few times but always pushed it later, since she did not have the right text or new photos available, was always busy, etc... Honestly I made this free project look like a professional experience in my resume and put the 2008 end-date, since it was the last time I communicated with my friend. Now I kind of regret doing that, since CIS can view this as a long-term work relationship between me and my client and I mostly worry about this part, since I was already here on H1B. Based on some attorney sites, the CIS see the range and do not care how many days or minutes you actually worked, but care about the established relationship period which is pretty silly.
Overall, many laws are old and are not kept up-to-date with the ever-changing reality. In the modern world, the CIS should realize that many computer professionals have previous work and business relations and old clients who may still seek support even after the professional moves to the US to work on H1B/TN? Does that assume that being on temporary work visa, I need to terminate all my previously-established connections and leave my good old clients stranded (sorry, I can't find a better word for it)? Working for one single US employer on work visa makes sense to protect US workers from unauthorized employment done by non-immigrants and all such employment needs to be regulated. However, supporting existing clients located in Canada from the US should also be perfectly legal, since it does not cause any harm to the US job market (neither client, nor the worker benefits from presence in the US). It is a legal gray area indeed and maybe the law should be very specific about it to avoid possible violations and misinterpretations.
My wife and I are also married for 3.5 years with a baby born in the US, I should probably be safe from marriage-related RFEs then?
Thanks again!

-- Tue Aug 31, 2010 6:10 am --

My other concern is that I entered the last US entry date as of 2009 when I crossed the Cnd/US border by land and my Canadian passport was not stamped at the POE. I am not even sure whether the border guard swiped it in the system to make the entry of my crossing the border. He just took my passport, checked the I-94, looked at the photo, asked a couple of questions and waved me through. Since I do not have an entry stamp on that date and probably no entry in the system, will it trigger some issues with the I-485? Will they ask me to prove my legal entry on that date if they cannot see the stamp or an entry in the system? There are tons of Canadians traveling to US every day, some travel by bus or by train, some commute to work abroad daily. Does every single entry get recorded in the system? I know that starting June 1, 2009 the new document rules started applying when crossing the border. Any ideas?

Every entry is recorded. I was worried about my wife, who drove with her sister in a rental car across the border at Port Huron just prior to our 485/140 application. No stamp on passport, her name wasn't anywhere on the car registration or anything, she didn't even see the passport being swiped. I was a bit worried about the lack of evidence she was in the US at the time of the application, but we just went with that date and there was no problem at all.

Let's suppose that my last entry is not recorded, because the guard did not swipe the passport for some reasons or the system was down for maintenance. It does happen sometimes, I read similar posts online. Will they still question me about my last entry by land and I will need to prove that I legally entered on H1B status from Canada. Ideas? Thank you.

If you entered at a POE with cameras and computers, and the vehicle is registered in your name, your entry was recorded - they may not have swiped your passport because your name and the car registration matched; they already have you recorded via the vehicle. This is why USCBP don't like people crossing in vehicles not registered to them for any reason. When they see that they may take you to secondary; this happened to my sister and I when we were traveling across at Ivy Lea in a car registered to our parents. Ogdensburg (I think you crossed there from a forums thread I saw) is not a minor POE; my wife got her H4 there, and it is fully equipped. The only internet example I have seen of someone being challenged to prove entry for Green Card purposes was a person with a B-1 card who crossed on foot at San Ysidro (ie no passport, no vehicle). At Ogdensburg (or virtually any other POE bordering Canada) your license plate was recorded and no doubt can be retrieved by a CIS official (as long as you provide the correct date and location) to confirm entry.