Toronto, Date — Canada has embarked on an ambitious endeavor to draw in highly skilled immigrants from around the world, encompassing the United States, where a stringent immigration system often hampers the acquisition of work visas for foreign tech professionals.
In a recent milestone, Canada introduced a comprehensive program extending a three-year work permit to holders of U.S. H-1B visas, a prevalent entry permit for tech industry expatriates. This initiative, conceived partially to accommodate individuals displaced due to Silicon Valley’s recent economic downturn, yielded an overwhelming response, with 10,000 applicants within the initial 48 hours. A spokesperson from Canada’s immigration department characterized this surge as “a robust indicator of Canada’s global competitiveness.”
This dynamic reflects not only the desirability of Canadian opportunities but also the frustration emanating from the intricate and sluggish U.S. visa application process. According to one estimate, a mere 1 in 10 participants in the annual H-1B visa lottery actually secure the visa.
Gireesh Bandlamudi, a 29-year-old software engineer from India, shares his own experience: “Canada visas are much easier,” he expresses. With a job offer in the U.S., he sought a more promising route and chose Canada. Remarkably, he finds himself working remotely from Vancouver for a San Francisco-based company named AtoB, which specializes in offering financial services to trucking enterprises. “My visa will only take up to four weeks!” he marvels.
Both the United States and Canada are actively vying to attract the brightest minds in technology. However, their approaches to immigration policies diverge significantly.
The United States follows a restrictive approach that often restricts its own potential. Since 1990, the U.S. has imposed an annual cap of 65,000 new H-1B visas, along with an additional cap of 20,000 for holders of advanced degrees from U.S. universities. Advocates from the tech sector contend that these limits are far too restrictive, but partisan divisions regarding immigration policy have hindered efforts to raise them.
In stark contrast, Canada has strategically pursued a substantial increase in immigration as a cornerstone of its overarching economic growth strategy. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has elevated immigration by over 40% within the past five years, welcoming more than 400,000 new permanent residents by 2021. On a per capita basis, this significantly surpasses the United States, which, despite issuing approximately one million permanent resident permits annually, maintains a population over eight times larger than Canada’s.
Canada has also streamlined work permit applications for individuals with sought-after skills, a category encompassing not only high-tech professionals but also healthcare practitioners, craftsmen, and artisans — all of which remain in short supply across the nation. Gireesh Bandlamudi’s journey to Vancouver exemplifies this trajectory, facilitated by the technology consulting firm MobSquad.
In the U.S., such an immigration policy would likely elicit heated congressional debates, with hardline Republicans advocating for reduced legal immigration.
However, in Canada, such a perspective is atypical. A substantial majority of the country’s major political parties have endorsed the notion of heightened immigration. While critiques have surfaced around the housing shortage exacerbated by the influx of newcomers, they underline a need to manage the flow rather than halt it entirely.
Doreen Barry, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, highlights the nuanced sentiment: “There are people who think the government is moving too quickly, but that’s not in itself for anti-immigration reasons.” Canadian conservatives have refrained from magnifying immigration as a significant political issue, setting them apart from their U.S. Republican counterparts.
In essence, the differing trajectories of the United States and Canada can be attributed to the fundamental distinction of border dynamics. Barry elucidates, “We have no border with Mexico. In Canada, we get to choose who comes in.”
While the United States’ immigration discourse often revolves around unauthorized entry along the southern border, Canada grapples with a more manageable challenge in terms of illegal immigration. Canada’s strategic approach to high-skilled immigration offers potential lessons for the U.S., where bipartisan consensus might prevail among pro-immigration Democrats and pro-business Republicans, if not for the overarching discourse concerning the southern border.
