TORONTO—
Canada has launched an ambitious program to recruit highly skilled immigrants from around the world — including the United States, where our stagnant immigration system makes it difficult for foreign technicians to obtain work visas.
Last month Canada offered a three-year work permit to any holder of a US H-1B visa, the most common entry permit for immigrants working in the technology sector. The program, aimed in part at workers laid off in the wake of Silicon Valley’s recent downturn, attracted 10,000 applicants in its first 48 hours – “a clear indication of how competitive Canada is on the global stage,” one said Spokesman for the country’s Department of Immigration.
It was also an expression of frustration among migrants who find the US visa system difficult and slow. According to one estimate, only about one in ten people who register for the annual H-1B lottery will receive a visa.
“A Canadian visa is much easier,” Gireesh Bandlamudi, a 29-year-old software engineer from India, told me. With a job offer in the US, he reconsidered his chances of winning an H-1B and applied to Canada instead. From his new home in Vancouver, he now works remotely for AtoB, a San Francisco-based company that provides financial services to trucking companies.
“My visa was issued in four weeks at the most!” he was amazed.
The United States and Canada are both trying to attract the world’s best technologists, but their policies on immigration are very different.
US policy has been self-limiting, if not self-defeating.
Since 1990, US law has imposed a fixed limit of 65,000 new H-1B visas per year, plus 20,000 for holders of master’s or doctoral degrees from American universities. US tech companies have long complained that these limits are too low, but efforts to raise them have been hampered by partisan divisions over immigration policy.
In contrast, Canada is deliberately seeking a large increase in immigration as part of a broader strategy to grow its economy.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party government has increased immigration by more than 40% over the past five years, welcoming more than 400,000 new permanent residents in 2021.
On a per capita basis, that’s more than four times the number of immigrants allowed in the United States. The US issues around a million permanent resident permits each year, but the US population is more than eight times Canada’s.
Canada is also expediting work permit applications for those with a required qualification. This category includes not only high-tech workers, but also healthcare workers, carpenters, plumbers and pipe fitters, who are also in short supply north of the border. That’s how Bandlamudi came to Vancouver with the help of an immigration service provider called MobSquad.
In the United States, such an immigration policy would spark a heated debate in Congress, where hardliner Republicans 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 targets last year, the initial criticism from the opposition Conservative Party was not that the numbers were too high, but that the government was not approving applications quickly enough.
More recently, the debate has focused on the country’s housing shortage; New immigrants are coming in faster than new housing units are being built, and housing prices in Toronto and Vancouver have reached or exceeded Los Angeles levels.
But those concerns have only led to suggestions that the government should slow, not reverse, the surge in immigration.
“There’s an argument that the government is moving too fast, but that’s not per se anti-immigrant reasons,” said Doreen Barrie, a political scientist at the University of Calgary. “If we bring in millions more immigrants and the economy falters, that could change. Canadians are not all saints. There are people who would prefer a more homogeneous society.”
Unlike US Republicans, however, Canadian Conservatives have so far avoided making immigration a major political issue.
Conservative party leaders have supported more legal immigration as a strategy for economic growth for the same reason as Trudeau’s Liberals. And Canadian conservatives have competed for votes in immigrant communities for decades, with notable success.
But it also reflects a fundamental difference between the two countries.
“We don’t have a border with Mexico,” Barrie noted. “In Canada, we can decide who comes in.”
For the United States, immigration as a political issue revolves around unauthorized entry across the southern border, a problem that Democrats and Republicans have tried to solve without much success.
For Canada, illegal immigration is a smaller but more manageable problem. Last winter, around 20,000 migrants migrated to Canada via a country road from upstate New York to Quebec in a surge so large it sparked political controversy. Under pressure from conservatives, Trudeau negotiated an agreement that allowed Canadian authorities to send asylum seekers back to the United States, making Canada not so different from other countries.
Still, Canada’s broad support for increased immigration of highly skilled workers should be a lesson for us. A similar bipartisan consensus almost certainly exists in Congress between pro-immigrant Democrats and pro-business Republicans. But in our case, screaming matches keep getting in the way across the southern border.
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