Hiring Foreign Workers

Hiring someone who is not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident raises two separate legal questions. Keeping them apart makes the process much easier to manage.

Step one: confirm that your new hire is authorized to work

Every U.S. employer must complete Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, for every new hire, including U.S. citizens. You examine the documents the employee presents, record them on the form, and keep the form for three years after the date of hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is later. Form I-9 is never filed with the government, but it must be produced on request during an audit.

Two details cause most of the trouble. First, you must use a current edition of the form; the edition date appears at the bottom of the form, and older editions expire. Second, paperwork errors are penalized on their own, separately from any question about whom you hired.

Step two: decide whether you can sponsor the worker

If the person you want to hire is not already authorized to work, U.S. immigration law generally allows you to sponsor them along one of two paths (which may or may not be viable depending on the specific circumstances).

The temporary path means petitioning for a nonimmigrant classification. The best known are H-1B for professionals in specialty occupations and L-1 for transferring a manager, executive, or specialized-knowledge employee from an affiliated office abroad, but there are roughly two dozen categories in all, including E, O, P, TN, and the H-2 seasonal classifications. Most require the employer to file a petition, and specialty occupation cases require a certified Labor Condition Application from the U.S. Department of Labor before the petition is filed. Our section on common work visas compares the categories used most often for employment.

The permanent path means sponsoring the worker for a green card through employment-based permanent residency. Roughly 140,000 immigrant visas are available each year across five preference categories. Most EB-2 and EB-3 cases require a PERM labor certification first, in which the employer tests the U.S. labor market and establishes that no qualified U.S. worker is available at the prevailing wage. EB-1 cases, Schedule A occupations, and EB-2 national interest waiver cases do not require labor certification.

Why H-1B needs its own plan

H-1B is the classification employers ask about most, and it is the most competitive. Congress caps it at 65,000 new visas per fiscal year, plus 20,000 reserved for workers holding a U.S. master's degree or higher. Universities and their affiliated nonprofits, along with nonprofit and government research organizations, are exempt from the cap entirely.

You cannot simply file a cap-subject petition when you are ready to hire. Demand has consistently exceeded supply, and the caps for the coming fiscal year are typically exhausted immediately. As a result, since 2020, an employer must first submit an electronic registration for each prospective worker during a short registration window each spring and be selected before a petition may be filed. Selection is no longer a purely random lottery: USCIS now weights selection toward higher offered wage levels based on Department of Labor wage data, and a beneficiary-centric process limits the advantage of multiple registrations for the same person.

H-1B has also been the most heavily litigated area of employer-sponsored immigration in recent years, including a 2025 Presidential proclamation that sought to impose a $100,000 payment on certain petitions for workers outside the United States, which is currently blocked by court order but remains subject to appeal. Because the rules shift, an H-1B strategy should be reviewed each cap season rather than reused.

Practical takeaways

Timing, not eligibility, is what usually derails a hiring plan. The H-1B cycle effectively runs a year ahead of the start date. PERM recruitment takes months before an immigrant petition can even be filed, which is only the start of a process that often takes a number of years. And how long a green card ultimately takes depends heavily on the worker's country of birth. Filing fees, form editions, and penalty amounts change frequently, so treat any figure on a web page, including this one, as a starting point.

If you are planning a hire, an internal transfer, or a green card sponsorship, we can map the available options against your timeline. Please contact our office to discuss your situation.

Last reviewed: July 2026. This page is general information, not legal advice, and immigration rules change frequently.