TN visa and nearshore IT staffing: What US companies need to know

This article is a submission by Fast Dolphin, a nearshore IT and engineering staffing firm with over 20 years of experience placing bilingual and multilingual tech talent across the Americas. Fast Dolphin serves clients across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia, offering temporary, contract-to-hire, direct hire, and dedicated development team staffing solutions.

If you’ve spent any part of the last year trying to fill a senior engineering seat, you already know the old playbook doesn’t move the way it used to.

Visa costs have jumped, timelines have stretched, and the talent pool you used to count on from India and Eastern Europe is harder to access through the usual channels.

That’s pushed a lot of HR and recruiting leaders toward a question that didn’t come up as often a few years ago: what about the TN visa, and how does it fit with hiring IT and engineering talent from Latin America?

The honest answer is that the TN visa is a useful, narrow tool, and nearshore staffing is a much bigger one. Most companies that build engineering capacity in Latin America never touch immigration paperwork at all, because their consultants work remotely from their home country.

The TN visa only comes into play for the smaller set of roles where someone genuinely needs to sit in a US office or on a US plant floor. Knowing where that line falls can save your team a lot of wasted time chasing a visa process you may not even need.

Why US companies are rethinking how they fill IT roles

The H-1B program used to be the default conversation for any company that wanted to bring in specialized technical talent from abroad. That conversation has gotten a lot more complicated.

Registrations for the FY2027 H-1B cap dropped to 211,600 from 343,981 the year before, a drop of roughly 38.5%, and there was no second lottery round to pick up the slack.

On top of that, the Department of Homeland Security has proposed an additional fee of $103,265 on cap-subject H-1B petitions, a cost that would land on top of everything employers already pay to file.

Even when a petition does get approved, the clock doesn’t move fast. Most H-1B petitions currently take between 10 and 11.5 months to process, depending on whether the case is a change of status or being issued abroad.

For a company trying to fill a senior engineering seat that’s already been open for months, that’s not a timeline that works. It’s one of the reasons so many HR teams have started looking south instead of waiting on a lottery they can’t control.

A newer wrinkle worth knowing about: the H-1B selection process itself changed. Registrations are now weighted by wage level rather than pulled at random, so a Level IV registration has roughly four times the odds of selection that a Level I registration does.

That rewards companies offering higher salaries and makes it even tougher for entry- and mid-level roles to clear the cap.

As H-1B costs and uncertainty climb, more teams are treating nearshore staffing as the more predictable path for filling specialized roles. That doesn’t mean every company needs a visa strategy at all. It means the smart move is understanding which hires actually require one.

What the TN visa actually is

The TN visa classification exists because of the trade relationship between the US, Mexico, and Canada.

Under USMCA, citizens of Mexico and Canada who work in one of a defined list of professional occupations can apply for TN status to work in the US for a US employer, without going through the H-1B cap or lottery at all.

Who qualifies: Mexican and Canadian citizens under USMCA

TN status is limited to citizens of Mexico and Canada specifically. Permanent residents of either country who aren’t citizens don’t qualify, and the process looks a little different depending on nationality.

Canadian citizens can typically apply for TN status directly at a port of entry, often on the same day.

Mexican citizens generally need to apply for a TN visa stamp at a US consulate before traveling, which adds a documented step but still moves far faster than most other work visa categories. You can see the full eligibility rules directly from the State Department’s TN visa program page.

In practice, the TN program is overwhelmingly a Mexico story. In FY2024, the US issued 15,672 TN visas, and 99.7% of them went to Mexican citizens, since most Canadians never need a visa stamp in the first place.

If your company is weighing TN as part of a broader Latin America staffing plan, Mexico is where that conversation almost always starts.

Which IT roles typically qualify

The USMCA professional occupation list wasn’t written with modern software roles in mind, so IT hiring usually gets routed through one of two existing categories: Engineer or Computer Systems Analyst.

Software developers, systems architects, and similar roles can often qualify under one of these, though the fit depends on the specific job duties and the candidate’s academic background.

This is one of the areas where getting the category wrong causes real delays, so it’s worth having someone familiar with current USMCA classifications review the role before filing anything.

Where the TN visa falls short for nearshore teams

The TN visa is fast and relatively inexpensive compared to the alternatives, but it comes with real limits that matter for planning.

No path to permanent status

TN status is built around what immigration law calls non-dual intent. A TN holder has to demonstrate they intend to return home eventually rather than pursue permanent US residency through that status.

That doesn’t rule out a green card down the line, but it does mean TN isn’t a long-term immigration strategy by itself, and companies planning multi-year US relocations for key hires usually need a different path.

Tied to a specific employer and role

TN status is employer-specific. If the person changes employers or the role changes meaningfully, a new TN application is required.

That’s manageable, but it does mean TN isn’t the kind of flexible arrangement that works well for contract-to-contract placements across multiple clients.

It only matters if the role actually requires US presence

This is the part that gets missed most often. A TN visa only matters if the job genuinely requires the person to be physically in the United States, whether that’s an onsite engineering role, a regulated position, or a team that needs someone on-site for collaboration.

If the role can be performed remotely from Mexico or another Latin American country, there’s no visa question to solve in the first place. A lot of companies spend time building a TN strategy for roles that never needed one.

TN visa, H-1B, and remote nearshore staffing: A side-by-side look

Here’s how the three paths compare for filling an IT or engineering role.

How TN visas fit into a broader nearshore IT staffing strategy

The TN visa and nearshore IT staffing aren’t competing options. They solve two different problems.

Nearshore staffing addresses the much bigger question of where to find qualified, bilingual engineering talent without waiting on a visa process at all, since most of these professionals work remotely and never need to enter the US.

TN status addresses the narrower case where a specific role needs someone physically present in a US facility or office.

Framed that way, the math changes. Instead of asking “can we get this person a visa,” the better first question is “does this role actually need someone in the US.”

For the majority of engineering, QA, DevOps, and data roles, the answer is no, and the company gets access to talent at a meaningfully lower cost without any immigration process attached.

Nearshore placements commonly run well below US costs, with at least one provider’s placement data putting the gap at a weighted average of roughly 54% for the same role, driven mostly by differences in how much engineering talent costs to employ across Latin America versus the US, not by anything related to visas at all.

For the smaller number of roles that do need US presence, usually Mexico-based professionals given how the TN program actually works in practice, the visa question becomes one more piece of an already-established hiring process.

That’s a very different experience than trying to figure out TN eligibility, occupation categories, and application timelines on your own for the first time.

Companies exploring Mexico as a nearshore IT hiring market often find this is exactly where the TN conversation becomes relevant, since Mexico accounts for nearly all TN visa activity.

Building both remote and TN-eligible teams

Most IT and engineering professionals placed through a nearshore staffing partner work remotely from their home country, in the same or overlapping time zone as US teams, and bilingual where the role calls for it, with no visa process involved.

When a specific role does require someone physically in the US and TN status applies, a partner that already runs both tracks can handle that process directly rather than leaving HR teams to figure it out alone.

In practice, that usually means two tracks. For capacity that scales with a project, flexible nearshore staffing adds vetted IT and engineering professionals for a defined period, with the option to extend or convert the role to a permanent one.

When the role is permanent from the start, direct hire placement covers the full-time search instead.

Either way, the vetting, time zone alignment, and work authorization questions sit with the staffing partner rather than the internal team.