Source: O'Reilly Next:Economy Newsletter 2022-07-01

Canada is seeing a tech boom that began during the hard-line immigration policies [of the Trump era]{.ul}. It's not just that US companies have a harder time [attracting foreign tech talent]{.ul}; a [2020 study]{.ul} showed that Canada is increasingly drawing talent from the US. US residents immigrating to Canada through a skill-based immigration program rose 75% between 2017 and 2019. And this doesn't appear to be a Trump era blip. Last year Canada announced that it had welcomed the [most immigrants in a single year in its history]{.ul}, while immigration to the US declined by almost 50%. The perception that immigrants aren't welcome in the US is one factor; the delay in processing US visa applications may be another. Canada's Global Skills Strategy program allows firms to have a position preapproved and get visas for the employee within two weeks. The same process in the US can take several months---when there's no backlog. (The current US [visa backlog is nearly 5.2 million cases]{.ul}.) Further exacerbating the problem, the US has an annual limit of 85,000 H-1B visas per year, while Canada has no such cap.

US legislators are attempting to address these challenges. The [US Innovation and Competition Act]{.ul}, which is currently winding its way through Congress, would authorize the spending of billions of additional dollars on STEM research and would, in one controversial provision, create a new visa avenue for people in the STEM fields.

For its part, the Canadian government is looking to capitalize on the trend, investing C$1 billion (about US$780 million) over the next five years to create an agency focused on investing in science and technology innovation. "[Immigration is the greatest competitive advantage we have]{.ul}," said Sean Fraser, Canada's minister of immigration, refugees, and citizenship.