H1B uncertainty drives Indian IT talent to Canada
TORONTO: Amid continuing uncertainty over the coveted H-1B work visa programme in the United States, tech talent, particularly from India, may be increasingly bypassing it and heading north to Canada. According to data provided to HT by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the agency that issues work permits to foreigners, it approved 4,400 applications until December 31 under the Global Skill Strategy programme it launched on June 12, 2017. The initiative is aimed at attracting top professional and managerial talent from overseas.
TORONTO: Amid continuing uncertainty over the coveted H-1B work visa programme in the United States, tech talent, particularly from India, may be increasingly bypassing it and heading north to Canada .
According to data provided to HT by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the agency that issues work permits to foreigners, it approved 4,400 applications until December 31 under the Global Skill Strategy programme it launched on June 12, 2017. The initiative is aimed at attracting top professional and managerial talent from overseas.
Of that number, over a third were Indian nationals, mainly employed in the information technology (IT) sector, making it the single largest source country of foreign employees, nearly four times the second-largest—China.
“In the global race to attract the investment of innovative companies, competitors in the European Union as well as the US have considerably larger pools of talent and labour to draw from than we do in Canada,” said Lindsay Wemp, a spokesperson for the department.
“What we’re seeing here is the movement of people who just didn’t feel comfortable because of the anti-immigrant sentiments in the US,” said Ravi Jain, a leading immigration lawyer in Toronto.
Restrictions on foreign workers have created uncertainty on the grant of H-1B non-immigrant visas meant for tech professionals, including those from Indian IT companies that have, over the years, been the main beneficiaries of the work visa programme. The Trump administration unveiled measures last month to effectively tighten rules on the hiring of H-1B workers by US firms at third-party locations, HT reported on February 24.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which issues overseas work visas, said in a statement that H-1B petitioners, or employers, will now have to “show by a preponderance of evidence” that the beneficiary will be employed in a “speciality occupation”.