L-1 (intra-company transferees)
An L-1 visa is essential if the employee of an international company (either a foreign or U.S. organization) is temporarily being transferred to a parent branch, affiliate, or subsidiary of the same company based in the United States (U.S.). The employee must be at a managerial or executive level, or have some specialized knowledge. He or she has to be provided a position within the U.S. Company at either of these levels, although not necessarily in the same position as held previously. Additionally, the employee must have been previously employed outside the U.S. with the international company continuously for one year within the three years preceding his or her application for the L-1 visa.
Recently the rate of rejection of this visa category has been high. Mumbai-based immigration lawyer Poorvi Chothani was recently quoted in the Economic Times regarding the significance and impact of high denial rates of L-1 visas to the United States of America (U.S.). "The high denial rate for Indians is alarming even though anti-immigrant voices, illogically, still harp on the large number of cases filed for Indian nationals as a justification for the large percentage of denials. We do not have data to determine the percentage of denials vis-a-vis the number of applications for non-immigrant visas. In our experience, L-1B petitions and visa applications filed under L-1B blanket approvals filed at Chennai have an equal chance of denial".
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