A visa is formal governmental permission granted for you to enter a country, other than your resident country. Requirements for visas vary from country to country, depending on the country and your country of origin. In many cases, foreign citizens must apply for a visa at an embassy, or consulate abroad, in order to travel to that country. A consular officer shall then decide whether you meet basic visa requirements for that country. Citizens of some countries may not be required to obtain a visa and can receive visa on arrival (VOA), if they are traveling to that country for business or tourism purposes for a short time. Thiese visas are valid for short trips in which you have a round trip ticket with certain airliners.

     A visa allows a foreign citizen to travel to a port-of-entry in the destination country, such as an international airport, a seaport, or a land border crossing. At the port-of-entry, a competent immigration officer, of that country, shall decide whether to allow, or deny, your entry to that country. Even with a visa, you may be denied an entry to the country. But that is rare.

      The visa system can be divided into two major categories. The first is officially called a permanent residence visa and is known as an immigrant/migrating visa, which entitles you to work and live in your selected country on a permanent basis. The second is called a non-immigrant/temporary visa, which vary in types and privileges, attached thereto. In general, they are issued for specific purposes such as vacation, study or employment.

     Many visa situations are very straightforward, requiring a simple form and no complicated analysis. However this is not always clear to the applicant, while others may be quite complex and involved. So there is always a chance that complications will arise that only an experienced attorney would notice.

     To simplify the law into a website like this, several legal cases often must be condensed into a single sentence, or a paragraph. Otherwise, this website would be several hundred pages long and too complicated for most people. However, this simplification necessarily leaves out many details and nuances that would apply to special or unusual situations.

Also, there are many ways to interpret most immigration/ visa questions.

     Therefore, in deciding to use the immigration expert service at TSL, or to do your own visa work, you must realize that you are making a cost/value analysis. You have decided that the money you will save in doing it yourself outweighs the cost of hiring professionals. Oftentimes with embassy rejection for incomplete or missing information the cost of doing one's own visa can become more than the cost of hiring an expert firm to get it right the first time. Most people handling their own simple visa matters never have a problem, but occasionally people find that they should have had an immigration expert straighten out the situation in the beginning and avoided the costs of re-applying, if the first application is rejected.