About Finlay Donesky

Finlay J. Donesky practices immigration law with the sensitivity and insight that comes from over twenty years of personal and professional experience dealing with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Finlay Donesky's own immigrant experience (described in the next paragraph) helps him anticipate and respond to his client's concerns and questions. He knows what it feels like to petition the USCIS and then wait anxiously for a response. He remembers the first time he tried to understand the notion of "intent" that is crucial to F-1 and other nonimmigrant statuses. And he knows from hundreds of entries into the United States and from submitting a wide variety of petitions to the USCIS that crucial differences exist between official USCIS policies and how things actually happen at Ports of Entry and USCIS Service Centers.

Finlay Donesky was born in India to Canadian parents and grew up in the United States and Canada. Although born a citizen of Canada, he grew up in Michigan as a Legal Permanent Resident of the United States. He gave up his LPR status in the United States after his family moved to Toronto, Ontario. Later, he returned to the United States in F-1 student status to earn his Ph.D degree in English literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Upon completing his doctorate in 1988, he changed from F-1 to J-1 trainee status to teach for a semester at the graduate theater program at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. After teaching for a year at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario and for a year at the University of Toronto, he returned to the United States to teach modern drama at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. As a professor at UK for seven years, he worked in H-1B status until becoming a Legal Permanent Resident, via the labor certification process. In 1997, he moved with his wife to the Twin Cities. He became a citizen of the United States in 1998.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota Law School in May 2002, Finlay Donesky opened up his own immigration law firm. While in law school, he was a Student Attorney in the Immigration Clinic. He served as Note & Comment/Research Editor for the Minnesota Law Review. Prior to opening his own firm, Finlay gained nearly three years of experience working in two small immigration law firms in downtown Minneapolis. Finlay is a member the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

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