A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Dec 26, 2017

As the US Tightens Visas For Tech, Canada Is Open For Business

 In a global war for talent, cutting off potential reinforcements is not a winning strategy. JL

Liz Robbins reports in the New York Times:

While much attention has been paid to President Trump’s policies cracking down on illegal immigration, the administration has also moved to restrict legal immigration, especially in the tech industry. Canada’s immigration agency started the Global Skills Strategy for high-skilled workers from abroad to get a work permit in two weeks. “The No. 1 priority of business today is where they can get the talent they need from the global talent pool,”
A Flatiron district artificial intelligence start-up was recently looking to expand, adding new engineers who happened to know a niche computer language.
The people it hired hail from Morocco, Belarus, France, Georgia and Canada. But they are not working in New York. They are in Montreal, where immigration policies make it possible to get work permits within two weeks, and the Canadian tech industry is aggressively trying to woo foreign companies.
“It’s becoming less and less sexy to be going to the United States,” said Tim Delisle, 26, a founder of the start-up Datalogue, which uses artificial intelligence to prepare and synthesize data for other businesses. He added that skilled foreign workers crave the greater stability that he said immigrants have in Canada compared with the United States.
While much attention has been paid to President Trump’s policies cracking down on illegal immigration, the administration has also moved to restrict legal immigration, especially in the tech industry, which draws many workers from abroad. In April, Mr. Trump introduced an executive order, Buy American and Hire American, which included requests to reform a visa program known as H-1B as a way to benefit American workers.
The program awards 85,000 temporary visas annually to highly skilled foreign workers in what are deemed “specialty” occupations through a lottery. Between application and legal fees, the process of applying for one H-1B visa can cost a company up to $6,000, lawyers say, and can take months; it is also as uncertain as roulette, with hundreds of thousands of applicants for the spots.
The assumption for the policy obviously is that companies want to bring in foreign talent that they can pay cheap compared to native US...
In contrast, Canada’s immigration agency in June started the Global Skills Strategy for high-skilled workers from abroad to get a work permit in two weeks.
“That is, excuse my English, goddamn fast,” said Hubert Bolduc, the chief executive of Montreal International, a public-private partnership that recruits foreign companies to move to Canada and offers support once they arrive in Montreal. “We’ve been loving government on this because we know it’s a talent game.”
In 2017, the organization conducted eight international recruiting missions, in London, Paris, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Its directors have made several informal visits to New York, where it came this month to woo a video game company.
With the Trump administration’s immigration policies, “We’re almost saying, ‘Don’t come,’” said Sunil Hirani, the co-founder of trueEx, an electronic global interest rates exchange, also in the Flatiron neighborhood. He came to New York as a child 40 years ago from India. “How can you have a ‘Come to New York City’ program if the people of New York City are going to get kicked out? How do you sell that?”
Last year, trueEx’s chief executive and president, Karen O’Connor, was looking at options to expand the company’s computer engineer group. A consortium related to Montreal International invited her to Canada for a visit that made her feel like a foreign dignitary, she said. There was the elegant lunch, the precisely coordinated meetings with potential business partners and a visit to the Montreal Stock Exchange.
Ms. O’Connor said the 50-person company could save more than $1 million in wages if it hired engineers based in Montreal. In part, that was because the cost of living was far less compared with New York and because the company could qualify for certain tax benefits.

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