How Canada is recruiting immigrants to boost its economy
Canada has launched an ambitious program to recruit highly skilled immigrants from all over the world — including from the United States, where our sclerotic immigration system makes it difficult for foreign tech workers to obtain work visas.
Last month, Canada offered a three-year work permit to anyone holding a U.S. H-1B visa, the most common entry permit for immigrants working in the tech sector. The program, aimed partly at workers laid off in Silicon Valley’s recent downturn, drew 10,000 applicants in its first 48 hours — “a strong indication of just how competitive Canada is on the global stage,” a spokesman for the country’s immigration ministry said.
It was also a reflection of frustration among migrants who find the U.S. visa system difficult and slow. According to one estimate, only about one in 10 people who register for the annual H-1B lottery get a visa.
“A Canadian visa is much easier,” Gireesh Bandlamudi, a 29-year-old software engineer from India, told me. With a U.S. job offer in hand, he considered his chances of winning an H-1B and applied to Canada instead. He now works remotely with Atob, a San Francisco firm that provides financial services to trucking companies, from his new home in Vancouver.
“My visa happened in four weeks, max!” he marveled.
The United States and Canada are both trying to lure the world’s best technologists, but they’re using very different strategies when it comes to immigration policy.
U.S. policy has been selflimiting, if not self-defeating.
Since 1990, U.S. law has a fixed cap of 65,000 new H-1B visas every year, plus 20,000 for holders of master’s or doctoral degrees from American universities. U.S. tech industry groups have long complained that those limits are too low, but efforts to raise them have been stymied by the partisan divide over immigration policy.
In contrast, Canada is deliberately seeking a big surge in immigration as part of a broader strategy to grow its economy.
The Liberal Party government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has boosted immigration more than 40% in the last five years, admitting more than 400,000 new permanent residents in 2021.
On a per capita basis, that’s more than four times as many immigrants as the United States admits. The U.S. issues roughly a million permanent resident permits each year, but the U.S. population is more than eight times the size of Canada’s.
Canada is also fast-tracking applications for work permits for anyone with a sought-after skill, a category that includes not only high-tech, but healthcare workers, carpenters, plumbers and pipefitters, who are also in short supply north of the border. That’s how Bandlamudi got to Vancouver, with the help of a technology consulting firm called Mobsquad.
In the United States, an immigration policy like that would touch off ferocious debate in Congress, where Republican hardliners have argued that legal immigration should be reduced.
Not in Canada. Here, increased immigration has long been supported by most of the country’s major parties.
When Trudeau announced higher immigration goals last year, the initial criticism from the opposition Conservative Party wasn’t that the numbers were too big, it was that the government wasn’t approving applications quickly enough.