Battle for high-tech talent hits fever pitch
Metro Vancouver benefiting from stricter immigration rules for workers trying to enter U.S.
Raza Mirza knows he could earn at least US$40,000 more a year south of the border.
The high-tech engineer, who was recruited to Vancouver from Pakistan in 2008, has watched many of his foreign-born colleagues grab their first high-tech jobs in Metro Vancouver.
But then, as soon as they can navigate the more difficult migration process into the U.S., many have moved to cities like San Francisco, Dallas and Seattle.
For a variety of reasons, Mirza is one of the foreign-born workers who intends to put down roots in Canada. He says he has “immensely benefited” from making the relatively easy immigration transition to B.C.
Mirza is one player in a complex global competition for high-tech talent, which has turned into a political and corporate tug of war.
It’s a battle that sometimes pits North American companies that seek foreign labour against homegrown Americans and Canadians who yearn for more access to computer training.
Metro Vancouver’s high-tech companies are growing rapidly in large part because they hire a host of foreign-born nationals and because, even with the city’s extreme housing costs, they are able to get away with offering significantly lower wages compared to U.S. companies.
CBRE Labor Analytics reports that Metro Vancouver and Toronto companies pay their software engineers, who are considered to be of high quality, average annual salaries of about US$63,000.
That compares to US$105,000 on average a year in cities such as Dallas, Columbus and Baltimore — and more than US$125,000 in San Francisco and Seattle, the latter just a few hours drive south of Vancouver.
Metro Vancouver’s high-tech sector has expanded at the same time Democratic and Republican administrations in the U.S. have been making it difficult for foreign high-tech migrants to work south of the border.
While many transnational workers dream of climbing the high-tech ladder in the U.S., that country’s politicians are pressuring American companies to train, hire and pay more to domestic Americans to do wide-ranging computer operations.
American high-tech companies have been pushing hard in the opposite direction, however.
They want to liberalize U.S. immigration law and open the country’s doors wider to immigrants and foreign students, particularly those from low-wage countries.
Microsoft first recruited Mirza, 32, to Vancouver directly from his homeland of Pakistan. He now works as a software engineer at Move in Richmond.
Since Mirza wants to live and work in Metro Vancouver with his wife and child and looks forward to the city expanding as a high-tech hub, one of his missions is to encourage politicians to find ways to cool the city’s frenzied real estate market.
To make housing more affordable, Mirza specifically seeks legislation that would discourage real-estate purchases by offshore speculators who don’t pay significant income taxes in Canada.
Who is getting hired in Metro Vancouver, which some enthusiasts call Silicon Valley North?
They’re referring to the giant hightech region known as Silicon Valley, which surrounds San Francisco.
Metro Vancouver houses major high-tech satellites of U.S.-based companies, such as Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Electronic Arts. As well, it’s home to Hootsuite, Slack, Avigilon, Vision Critical and more.
Simon Fraser University’s Karl Froschauer and the University of Calgary’s Lloyd Wong have discovered that Metro Vancouver’s high-tech companies assertively look abroad for workers, mostly from Asia, especially China.
High-tech companies do so, the professors say in a report, “because they spend a very small fraction of their salary budget on training and because B.C. universities produce relatively few graduates in the technology field.”
One cohort of workers often hired in Metro’s high-tech circles, says Mirza, is international students who “come here to study and get the work permit that goes with it. A lot are Asian, while others are from Latin America.”
In addition, Mirza said, Metro Vancouver’s high-tech companies tend to hire the children of immigrant parents or more commonly young immigrants who came to Canada with their families when they were children.
“It’s partly a cultural phenomenon,” says Mirza. “Asian parents want their kids to be engineers or in high-tech fields. We’re not really big on the liberal arts.”
Even though Mirza believes Metro Vancouver’s universities and colleges don’t produce enough local graduates to satisfy the city’s hightech sector, it doesn’t stop many of his transnational colleagues from wanting to leave for the U.S., especially Seattle and California.
Many are taking advantage of a U.S. law, he says, that allows foreign nationals who work for one year for an American satellite company to get an inter-company transfer to the U.S.
Although Mirza is grateful to be experiencing the better pay and freedom of speech that comes from working in North America, he acknowledges the downside of Canada’s approach is a “brain drain” on developing countries.
“It’s a tricky situation. It’s true that (Canada’s) immigration policy doesn’t help the people of the countries that often educate hightech workers. But at least many of us send remittances back home.”
Since he’s committing to Canada and its high-tech sector, though, Mirza’s key focus is on struggling for more affordable housing in Metro Vancouver, which is far more costly than almost any U.S. city.
In addition to extending the 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers of residential real estate in Metro Vancouver, he thinks politicians should lend a hand to locals who pay income taxes in Canada.
“I think,” he said, “governments should be providing housing incentives to newcomers and others who actually want to live, work and raise families here.”