Silicon Valley's H-1B Tech Workers Being Lured to Canada

Canada, which has opened its arms to immigrants as a solution to labor shortages, is trying to lure thousands of foreign tech workers away from Silicon Valley with new work permits aimed at H-1B visa holders in the US who face lengthy delays getting their green cards.

The Canadian government will start the new program on July 16, when it will begin issuing what will officially be known as “H-1B specialty occupation visa holder work permits.”

Under the program, which initially is scheduled to run for a year—if it’s successful, Canadian officials have indicated they will continue it—10,000 of the new permits will be issued to H-1B holders in the US, according to a report in SiliconValley.com.

The permits will give the H-1B holders permission to work for up to three years for almost any employer in Canada; spouses and dependents of HB-1 holders will be eligible to apply for residents, work and study permits.

According to Rana Sarkar, Canada’s consul general based in San Francisco, participants in the new permit program may be able to obtain permanent residents in Canada within three years and citizenship within a few years after that.

Sarkar said he expects the majority of the new permits will be issued to tech workers in Silicon Valley. “I would expect the majority would come from Silicon Valley. “This is where the talent is. This is where we’re coming to attract talent,” he told SiliconValley.

Canada currently has no annual limit on high-skilled temporary visas and no per-country limits for permanent residents. The United States limits H-1B visas annually to 85,000 for companies, resulting in the US rejecting the vast majority of applications being rejected every year.

The US also has established a quota system for the number of visas it issues per country; due to these quotes, employment-based green card applicants from countries like India can wait for decades to acquire a green card.

In recent years, the US also has tightened restrictions for spouses and dependents of H-1B holders. In the US, only spouses of H-1B visa holders with pending green card applications are eligible for work permits.

On June 27, Sean Fraser, Canada’s Minister of Immigration, announced a new Tech Talent Strategy focused on liberalizing immigration rules for foreign workers in the US. “We’re targeting newcomers that can help enshrine Canada as a world leader in a variety of emerging technologies,” Fraser said in a statement.

Canada also is planning to offer five-year work permits to foreign citizens employed by companies identified as contributing to the country’s “industrial innovation goals” and those in “select in-demand occupations.” The companies and occupations have yet to be specified.

Due to the surge in immigration embraced by its federal government, Canada’s population has surged over 40M for the first time and Toronto has become the third-largest hub in North America for tech employment, behind only Silicon Valley and NYC, according to a recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

A report issued by TD earlier this year said most of the new immigrants are settling in five heavily populated urban centers in Canada, including Greater Toronto, exacerbating housing shortages and putting upward pressure on home prices.

The report, authored by Beata Caranci, the bank’s chief economist, criticized the Bank of Canada for leaving interest rates low in 2021 as Canada absorbed a record-high wave of government-supported immigration.

Caranci said the central bank’s strategy of maintaining low rates in 2021 had fueled a surge in home prices, “speculative” behavior, leverage and what she called an “an injection of historic levels of household debt.”