Canada has become the land of tech dreams for Indian software developers and engineers as they choose moving here over the U.S, due to rising anti-immigrant sentiment under Trump’s presidency.
Technology companies in Canada are getting some of the best talent from their American counterparts due to the restrictive nature of American H1B visas and anti-Trump sentiment in the tech community.
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”- The Economist”]“Canada is gambling that by the time America wakes up to the cost of discouraging immigrants its tech sector will have secured some of the best talent,”[/pullquote]
“Canada is gambling that by the time America wakes up to the cost of discouraging immigrants its tech sector will have secured some of the best talent,” an article in The Economist said.
Canadian companies are expanding into the areas of Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning and are doing very well in the Fintech sector. This has led many techies seeking jobs in Canadian companies and moving to the country from across the border.
According to sources, Toronto has added more tech jobs in the recent past than the Silicon Valley, other provinces are doing well too such as Ottawa which is home to Shopify and Montreal which has Element AI.
Canada is still only in the third tier of destinations globally and is looking to move up. The country has also tweaked visa rules to allow for talent techies to come in and allows spouses to work. Canada’s multicultural identity and diversity also appeals to techies.
The new tweaked ways of brining in top talent to the country seems to be working, especially with Indian software tech workers, experts said.
Indians from America and elsewhere snapped up almost half of the new temporary visas (processing time: two weeks) that Canada began issuing in June 2017 at the behest of the tech industry. The number of Indian nationals taking the slightly longer route to permanent residency surged between 2016 and 2017—up by 83 percent for those who entered under a federal skills programme, up by 122% for those selected by provinces to fill specific vacancies, and up by a whopping 538 percent for those who entered based on work experience, the Economist article stated.
The article also quoted Allen Lau, the chief executive of Wattpad as saying ““I can clearly see the reason why people are shifting to us; The US is becoming less friendly.”
Wattpad is an Internet community for readers and writers to publish new user-generated stories in different genres, including classics, general fiction, historical fiction, non-fiction, poetry, fanfiction, spiritual, humour, and teen fiction.
However attracting immigrant tech workers from the US shouldn’t be the only thing Canada should be focusing it, making them stay and generate quality should be the long term goal.
