Consequences of Breaking an Employment Contract

Tanya Freedman, CEO Connetics USA International Nurse Agency: I am in the United States on my EB-3 Green Card. I've been at my employer for two months, and I don't like it here. If I leave what,  How will I be affected from an immigration perspective?

Michael Hammond, Immigration Lawyer: Well, I think there's a couple things to keep in mind. Number one is you may have an employment contract. And there may be implications for you leaving an employer before that employment contract is up.

So that's one implication that I think is significant, I think we have to understand that contracts are promises there are requirements that must be met by you. There's also things and promises being made by the employer on those contracts, they're saying they're going to pay you, you know, 12 bucks an hour, they gotta be paying 12 bucks an hour, you say you're going to work for a period of time, they're likely consequences for failing to do that. That's on the employment side.

On the immigration side, how it could affect your case, is if the USCIS at some point determines that you never intended to work for that employer, that you simply were using that employer as a way to get here to the US. And that as soon as you got here to the US, and got your feet settled down, you were leaving that employer and that was your plan. And that can be determined by a lot of things. A lot of times people post things on social media that maybe they don't think they anyone's going to look at that ultimately, the USCIS will look at.

So there are things and then in a case like that you could be charged with fraud, and you could then have your Green Card revoked. So I think you want to be very cautious, particularly with such a short period of time.

If you've only been here in the US two months, you probably haven't even been working very long, because you had to get your social security number and get your license finalized. And so you probably have any been an employer more than five, six weeks, probably at most. And so it would look extremely suspicious, in my opinion. So there are definitely risks in in what you're proposing.

Tanya: Thank you, Mike. And I think from our side at Connetics, what we always say to both nurses and employers is you have to think of that, that when sign up to go to a specific employers think about that as a marriage. You want to ask all the questions before you want to make sure that you feel comfortable and that you feel secure in understanding where that employer is based what they what they offer is, what do you know about the state or the location. So you want to be really take that very seriously, this is a big commitment, both from the employer side and from the healthcare worker side. And thinking of it like as a marriage is really a good way of kind of viewing it. Because as Mike says, there are a lot of both immigration and financial implications. And if you were to leave, especially in such a short space of time.