Conundrum . how long in the US

[Reba]

You're lucky then. We had 2 different lawyers mess up our stuff completely, they couldn't even fill in the paperwork correctly! They cost us a crap load of money and delayed our case over 9 months. I ended up doing it myself, after much yelling and gnashing of teeth at my husband, who continued to insist we needed a lawyer

[waterwaterwaterloolooloo]

haha. Well here is to hoping that that doesn't happen to me. If it does, I will be pissed.

[canadiangirlforever]

taken from cbp.gov

The burden of proof is always on the applicant. There is no set period of time Canadians must wait to re-enter the U.S. after the end of their stay, but if it appears to the CBP officer that the person applying for entry is spending more time over-all in the U.S. than in Canada, it will be up to the traveler to prove to the officer that they are not de-facto U.S. residents. One of the ways to do this is demonstrate significant ties to their home country, including proof of employment, residency, etc.

[Steven]

They have your customs declaration card

They are thrown away almost immediately, when I go through immigration at Calgary, you fill in the card, the CIS guy stamps it, you then hand it to the Customs officer who quickly looks at it and then throws it in the bin!

[Steven]

Any ways-I still think they should always stamp if you have a passport. Every country in europe stamps, why don't we?

In Europe you only get your passport stamped if you're not a citizen of an EU or EFTA country. I go to Switzerland pretty regularly, they're not even EU and they just have a quick look at my UK passport.

It's not practical to stamp passports at the US/Canadian border, plenty of people live in places like Windsor and commute to Detroit to work at GM or whatever, they'd need to get a new passport every couple of months if it was stamped every day.

[Steven]

On the subject of immigration lawyers - I tend to think they're at about the level of used cars salesmen most of the time, with extremely rare exceptions. The lawyers used by major companies in the US are okay, usually. If you use one my advice is to find one who is an immigrant themselves from the same country you are coming from, but even then, check them out in detail, there are a lot of Cuban "immigration lawyers" in Florida preying on naiive Cubans.

The best immigration lawyer I ever came across was Icelandic. I don't know how he did it but he managed to completely fiddle the immigration lottery in Iceland a few years back. Every single one of his clients got an immigrant visa. Either he's bloody good or he bribed someone at the US Embassy, but either way.