3 ms·

Canada is jumping on this opportunity to invite the US tech workers who are frustrated with US H1B visa restrictions and GC backlog by offering an express perma

• orangedog 12d ago
  Does Canada not already have an issue with not enough jobs available?
  • repeekad 12d ago
    The US says they don't want them, the point of the article is the new visa requirements (surprise) aren't converting into hiring US citizens but instead pushing the roles offshore.
    • philipallstar 12d ago
      Well yes, what difference does it make to bring people over to the US vs them doing the work overseas? Bringing people over has negative consequences in the US (housing demand goes up; water demand goes up; power demand goes up) and in the person's home country (money doesn't flow to the local country; good people leave who should be staying and building their own country).
      • Ar-Curunir 12d ago
        The only population growth the US gets is from immigration. Cutting out skilled population growth is not a good idea!!
        • philipallstar 11d ago
          Skilled is a subset of what the US gets, and that at the detriment to local workers (and to the countries the skilled immigrants originate from). Though to the local business owner's they're great - much cheaper.
          • philipallstar 9d ago
            I regret my accidental apostrophe there, and now it's there forever.
    • josefritzishere 12d ago
      [dead]
  • rayiner 12d ago
    My uncle is a skilled immigrant to Canada (electrical engineer) and was never able to find an engineering job. They live in an immigrant-heavy subsidized housing neighborhood full of people in the same situation.
    • orangedog 12d ago
      How do people get by when that happens? If you have no job after a period of time, what are your options?
      • rayiner 12d ago
        He tutors math and science, my aunt (who also has a graduate degree) works in a daycare. Canadian welfare is also quite generous. Their son is doing well, but I don’t see how it makes economic sense for Canada at that point. It boils down to a circuitous and expensive way to direct government dollars to smart people who are likely to have smart kids. You could save yourself a step and just give lower income kids in Canada IQ tests and throw money at the promising ones.
        • AE9283F6D36A 11d ago
          > I don’t see how it makes economic sense for Canada at that point It doesn't. Look at immigration numbers from 2000 to 2026 and overlay them with productivity per capita and GDP per capita.
    • dh2022 12d ago
      Plus one. My parents experience as well in Montreal. My dad could not understand why Canada bothered to move him and his family and the keep him on welfare. BTW - life on welfare in Canada was 5 times better than life as an electrical engineer in România. My parents never stopped thinking it was a really good idea to migrate to Canada.
    • Matthias247 12d ago
      I know it's not exactly the same. But would he consider becoming an electrician? Trade jobs are definitely getting more and more in demand, and the pay once established is definitely not worse than most engineer positions. Electricians in major canadian areas (e.g. Vancouver) charge 200$ per hour and more.
  • bijowo1676 12d ago
    the candidate for Canadian PR has to secure a job offer beforehand, so the Canada's plan is that US tech workers move their US jobs to Canada, and big tech employers expand their existing tech offices in Canada, rather than being forced to shell out $100k to Donny. Why should US employers be forced to pay $100k to Donny or compromise for substandard smaller labor pool in the US and bear increased costs?
    • theodric 12d ago
      Put another way: why should American employers be forced to hire Americans? If the labor pool is indeed substandard, they arguably have a vested interest in improving the quality of that labor pool rather than simply giving up on it. The $100k (and its consequences) are putting a finger on the scale in a nationalist manner to prefer local products. It's tariffs for people. It comes down to whether you have a globalist or nationalist mindset. Depending on which, you will come to a different conclusion about what to think. Should a government prioritize the individual success of citizens of its country, or the profitability of companies domiciled there (and therefore overall national economic performance)? Which approach, which tide lifts more boats by a meaningful amount? Which comports with a government's stated duties? You decide!
      • bijowo1676 12d ago
        Employers have only one job: to maximize profits, thats it. It is not employers' fault that US is unable to train tech workers, despite spending $30-40k per pupil in school system only to end up #27 in PISA ranking. The problem with all anti-H1B discourse is Lump Of Labor fallacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy ). The loudest people are the least educated about the consequences of blocking high skilled immigration.
        • happytoexplain 12d ago
          >Employers have only one job: to maximize profits, thats it. This is wrong. In practice, we bias toward this rule because it happens to align with benefit to society moreso than other rules (most of the time), but it is not the end, it is the means. The responsibility of employers (and all people participating in society) is to jointly maintain, and ideally improve, society. That's part of why government exists - to control harm-doers. Also, "the loudest people are the least educated" is probably true on most topics, but it's not a great way to make an argument. You should address the smartest people who disagree with you, not the dumbest (and that way, you also avoid being perceived as believing you are better than other people, which damns so much socially-bisected discourse at scale).
  • bunderbunder 12d ago
    Economics is generally not a zero sum game. At least according to what they taught me in Econ 101, on a macroeconomic scale skilled workers tend to increase job availability. They spend a larger portion of their income on services, which has a positive multiplier effect.
    • rbanffy 12d ago
      > skilled workers tend to increase job availability Who'd imagine squeezing the middle class would backfire epically? Compensation hasn't reflected the GDP per capital increases for the majority of the workforce. I don't think even the productivity increases from personal computers in the end of the 1970's have trickled down.
      • bpt3 12d ago
        > Who'd imagine squeezing the middle class would backfire epically? Compensation hasn't reflected the GDP per capital increases for the majority of the workforce. I don't think even the productivity increases from personal computers in the end of the 1970's have trickled down. Why would investments by employers result in higher compensation for employees? That said, median real individual income has increased substantially since the 1970s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n
      • davidw 12d ago
        Most of the 'squeeze' comes from things like housing and health care. The former driven by NIMBYs pulling the ladder up after them in so many desirable places.
        • philipallstar 12d ago
          A huge amount of housing demand comes from immigration. You can't call people who like their neighbourhoods "NIMBYs" for not wanting their nice area to triple in population to solve a problem. They aren't the problem. The demand is the problem.
  • BeetleB 12d ago
    They always had that issue - going back 20 years. Nothing new at the moment.
  • vlyan 12d ago
    one man's issue is another's man opportunity to overwork and underpay :) lower wages and higher rents are 99.99% of the reason for the West's immigration policies.
• bnm04 12d ago
  Work permit in 10 days (With qualifying job offer), not permanent residency.
• chaostheory 12d ago
  Canadian salaries are terrible once you realize that the cost of living in Canada is just as high or even higher than the US, which is why a lot of Canadian engineers left for the US
  • bijowo1676 12d ago
    its a matter of building a sustaining tech ecosystem: colleges, employers, investors ecosystem. Once they figure out the ecosystem Canada can arbitrage away the broken US immigration policies and anti-immigrant bigotry. Just as manufacturing jobs in heartland have left US for Asia, so do tech jobs can leave US for Canada, India and elsewhere
    • orangedog 12d ago
      The us is not anti-immigrant, it accepts massive numbers of immigrants every year. It would be below sustainable birthrate without it.
      • chaostheory 12d ago
        That was before the current administration. We are already below a sustainable birth rate directly thanks to policies by Miller.
    • chaostheory 12d ago
      > Once they figure out the ecosystem Canada 1. It is not easy to immigrate to Canada. 2. There is also a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment in Canada even from people on the left if you’re not white. Canadians just do not like Asians anymore. 3. Canada has so much red tape for business that it forces many entrepreneurial Canadians to either gravitate towards real estate, online streaming as entertainers, or simply just move down south.
  • bigmadshoe 12d ago
    This just isn't true. Yes, ratio of salary to cost of living is better in the US, setting aside the precarious immigration process, political instability, high rates of gun crime, lack of healthcare, etc. I left this reply to someone else claiming the same thing: You can easily look up the cost of living for e.g. Vancouver: > Cost of Living Including Rent in San Francisco, CA is 57.8% higher than in Vancouver > Rent Prices in San Francisco, CA are 91.7% higher than in Vancouver https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
• infecto 12d ago
  Canada historically is also one of the worst places to work in tech. Maybe it’s changed but I remember a decade ago tech jobs were paying a 1/4th of what they were in NYC/SF.
  • bijowo1676 12d ago
    Canada was bad for tech specifically because of H1B. Now that H1B pathway is being blocked, Canada can build an alternative tech center and ecosystem. They can do it, Canada has very strong CS programs and is a birthplace of AI and deep learning
  • embedding-shape 12d ago
    If pay and money is the only thing you care about then yeah. But for the rest of us, none of the places are "the worst place to work in tech" as long as you're in the northern hemisphere. Take a look at what the pay is in Chile if it's so scary to you.
    • bpt3 12d ago
      Pay and money are why people work, so yeah they're pretty important.
      • embedding-shape 12d ago
        Money is just a tool to get what you actually want, the goal itself shouldn't be "more money", unless you want to miserable, because that hole you feel never gets filled by shoveling more money down it.
        • bpt3 12d ago
          More money generally equals more freedom, even if you don't know what you want specifically, but you're ultimately talking about a bigger, unrelated issue.
    • infecto 12d ago
      Nope, cost of living is what matters and at least at the time major Canadian metros were as if not more expensive than SF/NYC and got you a 1/4th of the pay. I am sure that’s attractive to some but sounds pretty miserable. Chile I imagine has pretty good cost of living economics. Anecdotally most of my friends in Latin and South America live upper middle class on software salaries.
• dayyan 12d ago
  [flagged]
• BIGFOOT_EXISTS 12d ago
  Must be rage bait lol
• nonethewiser 12d ago
  Canada or Canadians?
• kccqzy 12d ago
  In my experience, people who didn’t make it in the H-1B lottery go to Canada, try the L-1 and come back to the United States. It’s good for Canada to offer a work permit so quickly, but I’m just not seeing people willing to obtain permanent residency in Canada. After all, for the same job, the pay in Canada is way worse. In fact I’m seeing Canadian citizens come to the U.S. to get a big salary bump while doing the same job.
  • rbanffy 12d ago
    > After all, for the same job, the pay in Canada is way worse. OTOH, you have free universal healthcare - and, the best part is that everyone in Canada gets it. You also have gun-free schools, abortions are considered healthcare, and, on top of all that, a sane government and a population that's considered pathologically nice to each other. Honestly, I'd take the pay cut (in fact, I did - but I live in Ireland instead).
    • thomasjeff1 12d ago
      Canada used to have free healthcare, not anymore.
      • rbanffy 12d ago
        How does it compare to the US?
    • deleted 12d ago
      [deleted]
    • zvorygin 12d ago
      If you have a tech job in America, you have good healthcare, your schools are safe, and you have access to abortions. All the tech jobs are in rich liberal cities. And this "sane government and a population that's considered pathologically nice to each other" is literally just the definition of chauvinism. Sure _you_ like it, and that's great. Let's not be assuming everyone in the world shares our values though.
• petcat 12d ago
  The economics don’t make any more sense for Canada or the EU than they do for the US. The the new $100k H1B fee was imposed because companies have a huge financial incentive to import semi-skilled workers from lower-wage markets rather than hire domestically. Canada and the EU face the same problem. In tech, it's about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [1] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway. The foreign tech workers that are worth the $100,000 fee are still easily getting their visa sponsored. [1] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-workers-return-india-us-jobs-245525 https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
  • mritun 12d ago
    Patently false narrative, equivalent to saying all americans are fat - both are extremely cheap uneducated arguments. Every single H1B I worked with was brilliant in their field - and paid extremely well often in excess of $400K. I know several that are earning well past $500K. If you claim these are generic Jira pushers, well you are showing ignorance. The $100K fees isn’t material to them but the whole vitriolic nonsense poured around what they do and just rolling their work in mud - well that’s where they just move and take their 50 ppl organization with them. This is pure nonsense.
    • dh2022 12d ago
      The H1B coworkers I work with really go the entire spectrum. The laziest programmers I met are H1B. And there are also some pretty smart ones that I learned a lot from and I continue to learn from. To say that the H1B are all brilliant is hyperbole.
    • geodel 12d ago
      Well, if this small fee can help brilliant folks to explore their horizons outside US, it would be all worth in end.
• geodel 12d ago
  I mean Canada has jumped so many times in last 8-10 years with these express residencies, hiring H1B laid off workers, grabbing people who are stuck with travel restrictions to US I'd have thought they be half way to the moon. In any case I wish well to people in Canada and Europe and people who are looking to move there. More spreaded opportunities lead to better outcome for everyone including US even if it does not look like one.
  • AE9283F6D36A 11d ago
    > I mean Canada has jumped so many times in last 8-10 years with these express residencies, hiring H1B laid off workers, grabbing people who are stuck with travel restrictions to US I'd have thought they be half way to the moon. What if I told you the people Canada really want have no issues getting a US work visa/Green Card? Check out O-1 visas and EB-1/2.
    • cvhc 11d ago
      > What if I told you the people Canada really want have no issues getting a US work visa/Green Card? This is ignorant. Stop pretending like the government is just barring illegals or "low-skill" workers (as you indicate in another thread) and welcome everyone else. I used to hold O-1. I have approved EB-1A I-140. Yet I ended up surprisingly being denied entry by the US CBP, unable to return to my home in the US, almost losing my job. The government is targeting all fronts. Those with slightest law violations are prosecuted and deported by ICE. High-skill workers from certain backgrounds are facing increasing visa/green-card scrutiny. International students are barred from internships (see recent regulatory changes for CPT and news about potential 100K fee for OPT as well).
      • AE9283F6D36A 10d ago
        > Yet I ended up surprisingly being denied entry by the US CBP Did it have anything to do with failing a background check? Often, denials aren't as "surprising" as they seem.
        • 10d ago
• fidotron 12d ago
  While 90% of Canadian tech grads work in the US on TN visas. This stuff doesn't actually help Canada at all, it's in a bit of a development trap.
• pastel8739 12d ago
  Man it’s embarrassing that they had AI write that for them
• cmiles8 12d ago
  Canada was already much cheaper than the US for tech. I was shocked to find out how little colleagues in Canada in the same role are paid relative to peers in the US. If the issue was cost the jobs would already be in Canada. If the issue was cost the jobs would also have already been offshored. The issue is on attracting the best talent and here, despite doomsday predictions to the contrary, the US continues to lead. The $100k fee is nothing to bring in top talent. Top talent was competing against Indian offshore companies scooping up thousands of visas for iffy-at-best talent. The cold reality is many folks in tech on this visa were mediocre talent at best coming out of degree mills or body shops, in roles that could easily be filled domestically if there wasn’t inexpensive overseas labor willing to work for less. Folks casually leave out the bit that all that iffy talent was crowding out far better talent looking to come to the US but couldn’t because they didn’t get picked in the lottery. This raising of the entry bar is freeing up space so the best folks have a better chance. Agree with it or not that’s what these changes are aiming to fix, and there’s little evidence this will just send all the jobs to Canada.
• rudi-c 12d ago
  While the U.S. capricious immigration policy gives an opportunity for Canada, it only gives it one particular opportunity: that of hiring educated, high-potential, but inexperienced immigrant workers. The thing about potential is that it needs to right environment to be realized. Canada still has two hurdles to create that environment: - Access to capital, either in the form of risk-tolerant VC funding or established companies willing to invest significantly in R&D. Those are not quick to move over the border. - A critical mass of _experienced_ talent. Entrepreneurs and high-agency ICs who've seen what it looks like to build a successful startup and capable of replicating it. Those don't have much incentive to move over the border either. The U.S. has hundreds of startups that later became unicorns. The employees of those startups are typically the key members that drive the success of new ones. For Canada, the only name that easily comes to mind is Shopify.
• cvhc 12d ago
  > an express permanent residency in 10 days This is false. Your source says it's for work permits. Though I still doubt IRCC would process an application in 10 days. My wife and I have been US tech refugees in Vancouver after our US working permits were indefinitely held for security checks. We are targeting Canadian PR through Express Entry (EE) in case we are not able to return to the US. I have to note it's not a sure path to PR for US tech refugees. EE heavily favors French speakers and workers with local education/working experiences, and penalizes "old" people above 30. It also subsidizes certain fields (healthcare, transport...) that's not favored by the market. If you can max French points and have a bachelors degree, you are in. If you are not in these favored categories, learn French (which a lot of new immigrants are doing) or wait for years to accumulate Canadian experiences (and hopefully the rule doesn't change). We have masters and PhD degrees, my wife has gained 1-year working experience here, and we have maxed English scores, but we haven't qualified only because we entered our 30s. PNP (provincial nominee) is a more guaranteed path to PR, but it requires company sponsorship and the chance still depends on your paid level and other factors. Our US employers view our relocation to Canada as temporary so they don't do it. The alternative is switching to a local position/company. But tech positions here in Vancouver are very limited (at least compared to US tech hubs). I personally don't really want to sacrifice the career just for immigration.
  • AE9283F6D36A 11d ago
    > US tech refugees Could we hold off on using the term "refugee" here? My partner works with actual refugees. We're talking about a 12 year old Ukrainian girl who last saw her father comatose in a hospital bed with both legs torn off, and who witnessed her entire neighborhood turned into rubble. I doubt you and your wife moving from a safe country to another safe country makes you a refugee of any kind. Call it what it is: you are economic migrants. > indefinitely held for security checks Canada has been known to be extremely lenient when it comes to background checks, which, honestly, is something that should be addressed if we want to maintain the free movement of people between the two countries.
    • cvhc 11d ago
      Could we stop meaningless language policing? I give you the context and I'm not pretending to be a war refugee. We had been living in California for years until USCIS arbitrarily hold my wife's new working permit apllication for longer than one year and had to leave the country to be able to work. The US CBP subsequentially denied my entry and revoked my visas after I visted my wife and used the same travel documents that I had used several times. I was forced to abandon my home in the US and even unable to collect my things and it almost runined my job. Her new US visa applications have been stuck in the consulate for longer than a year. Even under UN definition, someome forced to leave their home due to unfair treatments is a refugee.