NEW YORK—President Donald Trump’s plan to cancel or renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement has Canadian professionals working in the United States under a special NAFTA visa anxious, but immigration lawyers say the hysterics are ill-placed.
“We do not have a dictatorship, the hysteria is maddening,” wrote one lawyer in an informal poll conducted by Joseph Grasmick, a business immigration lawyer who literally wrote the handbook on these NAFTA visas, called TN visas.
TN visas give Canadians in qualified professions (ranging from registered nurses to dairy scientists) the ability to work in the United States without a limit on the number of times they can renew the visa, and with relatively little paperwork.
But if NAFTA is cancelled, so are the visas.
Grasmick polled Canadian lawyers practising U.S. immigration law, as well as U.S. lawyers doing the same in upstate New York. They were virtually unanimous in their opinion that there was little to worry about, though their clients seemed to think otherwise.
“I received too many messages like this to count,” wrote one lawyer in upstate New York.
Another lawyer, whom Grasmick describes as a top border lawyer, agreed that significant change was unlikely.
“I think changes will be with enforcement priorities rather than benefits,” she wrote.
That enforcement is more likely to focus on the Mexican border rather than the Canadian border, said Grasmick.
