How do I bring someone to the United States as a nanny or babysitter?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office here in St. Louis, Missouri.
We get a surprisingly high number of questions about nannies. People want to bring someone to the United States to work in their house as a housekeeper, or a nanny, or to babysit their children. Now, a lot of times this is based on wanting their children to learn the language or the customs of the home country, but we get contacted by people all the time who are natural born Americans who have not even been to a particular country, and they want to bring someone from that country to the United States.
And sometimes these requests are for a specific person. In other words, we know someone back in say, Sudan. I had a request the other day for one of my old clients, and he wanted to know if he could get a nanny from Sudan to come to the United States and help watch his children.
And a lot of times people want to bring a cousin or an aunt or a niece or somebody like that. And this is not going to work. In order to get a visa for a nanny, those visas are J-1 exchange student visas, and you have to go through an agency that has been vetted and inspected and complies with all the rules related to nanny visas and J-1 visas.
And of course, right now under President Trump, those are on hold anyway. But putting aside to the issue, putting aside the issue of the President's most recent ban on this, generally for nannies to come to the United States they have to go through one of these agencies, and you can't pick one particular person.
A lot of times, these countries don't operate in the same country that you want to bring someone from, or they don't have any context there. So they don't have a field of applicants.
And I think it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to match one sponsoring family with one nanny. In other words, what has to happen is you have to go through the agency and you have to go through the people that they have vetted.
Those people who've applied to come to work as a nanny. You can't just have your cousin Agnes come to the United States and work for you as a nanny. You're not going to be able to get an employment visa like an H-1B visa, because nannies are not specialty occupation.
So unfortunately our office is not going to be able to help with that. Many of these cases are denied, and it's very difficult. And usually you have to go through, like I said, those agencies. So we would just direct you to those agencies.
We'll put a link in the comments down below as to where you can find those agencies. But for the most part, it's probably not going to work the way that you want.
We hope this video makes sense. If you have questions, give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home.
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