by Steven » Wed Nov 26, 2008 10:21 pm
You probably want L-1A or L-1B - intra-company transfer. L-1A is for management and L-1B is for employees with "specialized knowledge", which means bespoke knowledge about how the company works, not that you have a Ph.D or something like that.
L-1A is the better one to get because it can be renewed one extra time than L-1B and lasts for seven years maximum, L-1B is only five years.
What you do then is get your employer to sponsor you for permanent residency, but this takes awhile which is why it's not really practical straight away. You probably fall into EB-3 skilled worker - if you bang that into the USCIS website it will tell you what the requirements are, but the one thing it doesn't say there is that it takes 3.5 years roughly for a visa number to come up after the I-140 is filed (and for that to be filed, first the labour certification has to be done) and then however many months for bureaucracy to take place for your AOS to permanent residency (a year probably).
So do the math and basically you need to get your employer to sponsor you pretty much immediately for permanent residency if you go in as L-1B, otherwise it will run out before your application is completed.
If you're lucky you might qualify for EB-2 (check the requirements), which is much faster as visa numbers are usually available pretty quickly.
Steve.