I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

In most job applications, I need to answer the two following questions 1) Are you legally authorized to work in the US? and 2) Will you now or in the future require sponsorship? I'm looking for advice on how I should be answering these questions.

For example, I believe I should technically be answering NO to 1) and YES to 2), but I'm slightly unsure about this.

I've heard recently that some Canadians actually recommend answering YES to 1) as getting a TN visa is very simple and not too much harder than just hiring an American. The idea is that when you answer NO to 1) that recruiters (and especially startups who are often more naive about visas) will lump you in as being hard to hire like immigrants who come to the US on the H1B and then filter out your application.

As for question 2), because the TN is a "Nonimmigrant" visa, does this technically mean I can answer NO here?

Basically in summary, how would you recommend I answer these questions? I don't want my applications to get auto filtered, but I'd also like to be as honest as possible.

We actually hired some Canadian talent -- we just used an EOR in Canada. The EOR cost us about $600 a month per head as their cut, but it was worth it to get the excellent developers we have through that deal.

The reason why some/many firms would filter out anyone saying NO to (1) is that getting a visa sponsored requires significant work of a specialized nature and our company certainly is not equipped to do that because we don't have people who have the time and skills to deal with the insane demands of our government to obtain the necessary document (This is not a new or partisan issue btw, I remember losing a great developer in the Obama years due to the feds giving her the run-around).