Immigration edict vexes Canada’s tech leaders
Proud to be ‘doing the right thing’ by remaining open to newcomers
Shortly after President Donald Trump barred travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, messages started flying around Canada’s tech community.
There was sadness and anger, as well as practical concerns about how to conduct business without the ability to travel to the States, for those who originated in the targeted countries. The discussion turned to what to do about it.
On Monday, an open letter was published, signed by 150 people from Canada’s leading tech companies and accelerators, including Kik Interactive Inc., OpenText Corp. and Waterloo, Ont., startup-supporting non-profit Communitech. The letter denounces Trump’s executive order and calls on the federal government to offer visas to anyone displaced by it.
There’s an obvious opportunity for companies to snag highly coveted tech workers and founders who are no longer able to enter the United States. But signatories to the letter insisted they were acting out of humanitarianism first.
“That’s what I feel most, is national pride in doing the right thing,” said Ben Baldwin, cofounder of the corporate innovation consulting firm ScaleDriver Inc. “It’s genuine.”
The ban has many in the tech industry re-evaluating plans to travel to the United States.
Hamid Akbari, a dual Canadian-Iranian citizen and chief executive of Blanc Labs Inc., a software company, said many of his foreign-born employees are also rethinking the wisdom of trips and stopovers to the U.S.
“We are re-calculating any plans in the United States,” Akbari said. “The next time you’re in the U.S., you don’t know if you’re going to be detained. You don’t know if another order came while you were in the air or while you were in the country.”
The tech industry depends heavily on immigration to recruit people with the necessary skill sets.
American tech heavyweights including Apple Inc. and Google parent company Alphabet Inc. have denounced Trump’s executive order barring people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entry for 90 days, which the Trump administration says is designed to keep terrorists out.
Trump has also announced plans to overhaul a work visa program that brings tens of thousands of tech employees to the U.S. every year. The proposed reforms would give priority to the most highly-paid workers if companies can prove there were no available Americans to hire.
Sunil Sharma, co-founder of the technology accelerator Extreme Startups, said the attention may increase interest in Canadian immigration programs, such as the startup visa. He is also the chair of Canada’s Accelerator and Incubator Association, one of three industry associations that manage that program.
“With this Trump executive order, there’s definitely going to be a strong level of attention the tech community is putting on bringing entrepreneurs and technical people to Canada, in addition to the purely humanitarian point of view,” Sharma said. “It’s a very powerful global immigration program.”
The startup visa allows teams of five co-founders and their families to come to Canada if they are sponsored by a designated organization, including venture capitalists, angel investors and accelerators or incubators.
The next time you’re in the U.S., you don’t know if you’re going to be detained.
Abdullah Snobar, executive director of the DMZ at Ryerson University, said many of the founders and employees at his accelerator come from countries affected by the U.S. travel ban.
“This country has been built on the backbone of immigrants, of people who came to this country as refugees,” Snobar said.
“It’s less opportunistic and more about doing the right thing. We have to stand as one.”