Are Canadian immigration policies stealing American tech talent?
Source: O'Reilly Next:Economy Newsletter 2022-07-01
Canada is seeing a tech boom that began during the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump era. It's not just that US companies have a harder time attracting foreign tech talent; a 2020 study showed that Canada is increasingly drawing talent from the US. US residents immigrating to Canada through a skill-based immigration program rose 75% between 2017 and 2019. And this doesn't appear to be a Trump era blip.
Last year Canada announced that it had welcomed the most immigrants in a single year in its history, while immigration to the US declined by almost 50%. The perception that immigrants aren't welcome in the US is one factor; the delay in processing US visa applications may be another. Canada's Global Skills Strategy program allows firms to have a position preapproved and get visas for the employee within two weeks.
The same process in the US can take several months---when there's no backlog. (The current US visa backlog is nearly 5.2 million cases.) Further exacerbating the problem, the US has an annual limit of 85,000 H-1B visas per year, while Canada has no such cap.
US legislators are attempting to address these challenges. The US Innovation and Competition Act, which is currently winding its way through Congress, would authorize the spending of billions of additional dollars on STEM research and would, in one controversial provision, create a new visa avenue for people in the STEM fields.
For its part, the Canadian government is looking to capitalize on the trend, investing C$1 billion (about US$780 million) over the next five years to create an agency focused on investing in science and technology innovation. "Immigration is the greatest competitive advantage we have," said Sean Fraser, Canada's minister of immigration, refugees, and citizenship.
Originally published on Bear.