The trip itselfQuestion 8 of 11
“What will you do in the US?”
The short answer
Visiting your children is a reason to go. Helping at their motel, store or gas station is not, even without pay. The State Department says: "An individual on a visitor visa (B1/B2) is not permitted to accept employment or work in the United States."
The advice going around
It is only helping, and there is no salary
Sitting at the front desk of a son's motel sounds like family rather than employment, especially with no money changing hands. The State Department's wording does not turn on pay. It says a person on a visitor visa is not permitted to accept employment or work, and the second word is the one that catches this.
At the window
The same question, answered two ways
What most people say
“Sir, my son has a motel! I’ll just sit at the front desk. Free help, no salary!”
What works
“Sir, we’ll stay with our son, see the city, and come home in two months.”
A visitor visa means no work. Not even at your son’s motel.
His inner voice · episode 8
So tell the officer what you will actually do there: stay with family, see places, come home.
Check it yourself
What the embassy actually publishes
A US visitor visa does not permit work, paid or unpaid
An individual on a visitor visa (B1/B2) is not permitted to accept employment or work in the United States.
Read 17 October 2026
The rule behind it
What the law actually says
A US visa application starts from the assumption that you intend to stay
The officer does not start from neutral. The law tells them to assume you intend to stay, and the burden is on you to show otherwise. That is why almost every question is a way of asking the same thing: what brings you back.
Every alien [ … ] shall be presumed to be an immigrant until he establishes to the satisfaction of the consular officer, at the time of application for a visa [ … ] that he is entitled to a nonimmigrant status.
What we can and cannot do
We are licensed for Canada (RCIC R710507). We help with US visitor visa applications, and for US legal advice a US-licensed immigration attorney is the person to ask.
Where this stops
What this page does not claim
This page rests on the single published sentence above and goes no further than it. It makes no claim about what counts as helping out in a family business, because nothing official that we could find draws that line.
Keep going
The rest of the interview
Before the window
Send us the file before the interview, not after.
We read the DS-160 against what the officer will ask, tell you which answers are doing you harm, and say plainly where the gaps are. If the honest answer is that nothing is wrong, we say that too.
Three fields · about 30 seconds