BACKLASH HELPS CANADA
Donald Trump’s malice towards foreigners is pushing skilled workers north of the border,
Trump’s xenophobia helps Canada’s tech sector Growing U.S. antagonism toward foreigners should be a boon to Canada, whose skilled-worker friendly immigration practices, reputation for civility and influx of venture capital have already created a flourishing high-tech ecosystem.
Donald Trump’s Jan. 28 executive order imposing a three-month ban on immigrants from seven Muslimmajority countries, temporary though it may be, has indelibly marked America as hostile to foreigners. The world’s best and brightest talent now have even more reason to migrate to Canada rather than the U.S., or a Europe where xenophobia runs wild.
Short-sighted U.S. immigration policy predates Trump. The U.S. issues only 65,000 H-1B visas for high-skill immigrants per year, even as the U.S. currently has about 500,000 unfilled positions for computer programmers alone.
Which explains why, dating from the late 2000s, Canadian facilities were set up by Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Google Inc., Facebook Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and scores of non-household name U.S. tech firms.
About 250,000 Canadians work in Silicon Valley, including James Gosling, the Alberta native who invented the Java programming language. Each is a candidate to come home.
And U.S. venture-capital spending is about 20 times Canada’s. Luring even a fraction of that money to Canada would further strengthen the country as one of the world’s larger high-tech centres.
Among the signs to monitor is another Trump executive order, still in draft form, that will examine “reforms” to the H-1B program. The program has long been under attack by nativist U.S. politicians. A crippling of the H-1B program would bring even more offshore talent to Canada. Europe may get first openly xenophobic head of state That’s what the 67 million people of France are preparing for as the May 7 presidential election approaches.
Now that François Fillon has lost his front-runner status due to a scandal that broke last week, the path is cleared for Marine Le Pen and her anti-immigrant, anti-European Union (EU) and anti-Eurozone views to become the national agenda of France, the country that more than any other gave birth to the postwar project of European unity.
Fillon is accused of putting his wife on the federal payroll in a post in which she did no work.
Given that Le Pen already had a modest lead in some January polls before the Fillon scandal, Le Pen is well and truly poised to lay claim to the Élysée Palace.
Fillon’s conservative party has little time to build a fetching campaign around a new candidate.
Yes, a victorious Le Pen could overplay her hand and botch her political honeymoon, as Donald Trump has done.
In that case, Angela Merkel will be safe in Germany’s national election later in the year.
But the all-important German chancellor’s bid for re-election to head Europe’s biggest economy is jeopardized if Le Pen reinforces her popularity early in her tenure, drawing support from French voters who did not support her National Front at the polls.
And that’s the outcome to bet on, since the savvy Le Pen is, unlike Trump, a veteran politico.
In that case, Chancellor Merkel’s re-election prospects will dim, and the likelihood that another voice of reason will be sidelined will grow.
The integrity of the EU is at stake in these two electoral contests, since the 60-year project of European unity is anchored by France and Germany. Easy money to continue Mounting political instability in Europe and the U.K. has its counterpoint, thankfully, in stronger-thanexpected economic recovery across the continent as 2017 dawns.
Keep your eye on the European Central Bank (ECB), which has used “quantitative easing” (QE) to inject some $1.6 trillion (U.S.) so far into the 19-member Eurozone. That’s the same remedy the U.S. Federal Reserve Board used to sustain economic stimulus after a Republicancontrolled Capitol Hill put an abrupt end to Barack Obama’s curative stimulus program.
The ECB has talked about “tapering,” or scaling back, its QE campaign. But for now, the ECB remains sufficiently concerned about Brexit and political upheaval on the European continent to stay the QE course.
That annoys Germany’s traditionally tight-money authorities. They fear inflationary side effects from the ECB’s easy money program. But those fears are overstated. Until relatively recently, the big worry was deflation, which was inhibiting recovery in GDP growth.
Watch for the ECB to continue placating German hardliners with platitudes about an eventual tapering, but carrying on with QE, where the central bank buys government debt to indirectly inject money into faltering economies. And QE is working. It largely accounts for the long overdue economic turnaround not only in powerhouse economies Germany and France but in Lithuania and Austria, as well. Spain, hardest-hit of the major Euro-economies by the European economic crisis that began in 2011, has emerged from recession to post three consecutive years of GDP growth.
What the German hardliners don’t seem to appreciate is that the sustained economic recovery sought by the ECB reduces the likelihood of political turmoil in the key European elections scheduled this year in France, the Netherlands, Germany and possibly Italy.
After all, it is six years of European economic misery — as much as the more-often-cited flood of immigrants to Europe — that has driven the Continent’s populist discontent.