AAO Approves Executive / Manager Petition for Joint Venture
Posted Apr 27, 2001

The Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) of INS approved a motion to reconsider an EB1 Executive / Manager I-140 Petition, after the INS Service Center had denied the petition. The issue was whether the petitioning company qualified as a subsidiary of the foreign company even though the foreign company owned only 50%, not a majority share.

As background, the EB1 Executive / Manager category for the Green Card is quite similar to the L1A temporary visa for managers and executives. The manager must have worked for at least one year for the foreign company in a managerial capacity, and must be coming to the U.S. to work in a managerial position. As with the L1, there are specific requirements as to the relationship between the U.S. and foreign entities. The U.S. entity that will employ the manager can be the parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of the foreign company where s/he worked for the year abroad. The INS regulations set forth detailed definitions of these terms.

In this case, the prospective employer (Petitioner) was a 50-50 joint venture of a South Korean company and a U.S. company. The Petitioner was able to show that the company had been founded as a joint venture, and that each of the two companies that had organized the venture had "negative control" through veto power. A variety of company documents reinforced this claim. Therefore the AAO overturned the denial of the INS and approved the petition on appeal.