Douglas Todd: Amazon’s Vancouver ‘news’ lacks facts on jobs, migrants coming this way

2018/05/12 Leave a comment

More on the Canadian advantage in hiring talent and the mobility in the tech sector, written from a somewhat ambivalent perspective:

….The extent to which Canadian high-tech companies rely on foreign workers, international students and would-be migrants is explained in the book Trans-Pacific Mobilities: The Chinese and Canada (UBC Press), edited by the University of Calgary’s Lloyd Wong, with a key contribution by SFU’s Karl Froschauer.

Although Wong and Froschauer have never responded to my requests for interviews, they wrote in Trans-Pacific Mobilities that Metro Vancouver’s high-tech companies assertively look abroad for workers, mostly from Asia, and especially in India and China.

They do so, the sociologists write, because it means they can “spend a very small fraction of their salary budget on training and because B.C. universities produce relatively few graduates in the technology field … High-tech computer programming and computer systems analysis have been the two most common intended occupations of all skilled immigrants to Canada.”

Some international financial experts, however, are beginning to be more upfront about how one reason Canada’s high-tech sector is growing, particularly with satellite U.S. companies, is it is easier to get a visa to work in Canada than south of the border.

To put it simply, Canada’s open attitude to tech talent is the opposite of Trump’s, where the current national motto is, “Buy America. Hire America.”

Trump talks about further cracking down on the country’s coveted H-1B visas, which are used to place foreign workers in high-skilled U.S. jobs. As the BBC reports, U.S. politicians place a tight cap on H-1B visas because many do not want to see them used to replace skilled American workers with cheaper overseas counterparts.

Trudeau, on the other hand, is fast-tracking offshore high-tech workers and students. He’s brought in efforts like the Global Skills Strategy, which builds upon the 2015 “Express Entry” program; a free, online process that allows skilled workers to apply easily to immigrate.

Of the 500,000 international students in Canada in 2017, which was a 20 per cent jump from 2016, many are studying in technology fields.

One advantage in their coming to Canada is that — unlike in the U.S. where they are normally not allowed to stay in the country after they graduate — they can stay at least three years extra in Canada to work and go to the front of the queue for immigration. Another advantage of starting in Canadian high-tech is that foreign nationals who work for an American satellite company for one year can then get an inter-company transfer to the U.S.

Data is not available on how many Canadian-born or raised young people are getting jobs in the high-tech sectors in Vancouver, Toronto and across Canada. While employers routinely claim there is not enough local talent to hire, some B.C.-based business professors counter that there aren’t enough jobs for students graduating out of Canada’s high-tech programs.

In the midst of such trans-national confusion, shortage of facts and sometimes fantastical claims, there are pros and cons to the way the high-tech sector in Canada has become key to what Brock University researcher Zachary Spicer calls a globalized “brain churn.”

The world’s skilled workers, whether in Asia or North America, are not just flowing in one direction. They’re “churning,” shifting rapidly from country to country while chasing the most strategic jobs, with the restrictive U.S. generally being most sought-after, in large part because of its stronger salaries.

Raza Mirza, a high-tech worker in Vancouver who was recruited from Pakistan by a U.S. high-tech company, is not following the lead of many of his colleagues and moving to the U.S., even though he could make at least $40,000 Cdn more.

Separate from his own interests, he’s among many convinced the United States’ relatively protectionist approach to foreign labour, compared to Canada’s open policy, is definitely  boosting the high-tech sector in Canada.

“I believe the shortage of U.S. talent, and the U.S.’s unwillingness to let companies bring in more global talent, has been a huge factor in why U.S. technology companies are increasing their Canadian footprint.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Amazon’s Vancouver ‘news’ lacks facts on jobs, migrants coming this way

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Doug Todd: “Techno-immigrants” fuel Vancouver’s high-tech sector

2017/05/01 Leave a comment

Interesting study, which recalls an earlier Globe article, Microsoft reminds us that Canada is still a branch-plant economy, on how Microsoft (and likely others) strategically use Canadian immigration as a way to bring talent to their US headquarters:

In light of the political manoeuvring in B.C. over local high-tech jobs and training, the study by Froschauer and Wong quotes the president of a large B.C. high-tech association who says a key reason “Microsoft chose to open a Vancouver office was because of the easier immigration rules.”

The unidentified high-tech CEO told the researchers there’s a crucial reason Microsoft did not simply open its computer development “campus” in Redmond, Washington, which is headquarters for the global tech giant.

“It’s like two hours away, so why would they open up this campus in Vancouver?” said the CEO.

“It’s much easier to bring in (migrants from India) and others, and that’s the reason they came. And their intention is not to recruit people away from other companies in the Lower Mainland but to bring fresh people in, and that’s what the larger companies do. Small ones don’t have the means.”

High-tech companies in B.C. and Alberta also often cross the U.S. border to recruit Chinese and other foreign students, say the authors, because international students in the U.S. are generally not allowed to remain in the country after they graduate, whereas they can stay after graduation in Canada.

The sociologists do not estimate the proportion of Metro Vancouver’s high-tech sector that is made up of immigrants, international students or temporary foreign workers, but they quote the CEO in confirming migrants are “very, very useful. I don’t think we could evolve our sector without” them.

Many of the techno-migrants interviewed in the study say it’s often an advantage to be a migrant in Canada’s high-tech sector.

But others said being born outside the country can be a disadvantage, particularly because of difficulties with language.

Some people from China told the researchers that migrants from India don’t have as many problems with language, since many in the former British colony were educated in English from their childhoods.

Some high-tech executives in Metro Vancouver and Calgary favour temporary foreign workers over immigrants, add Froschauer and Wong, whose article appears in the new book, Trans-Pacific Mobilities: The Chinese and Canada(UBC Press), edited by Wong.

The sociologists learned some corporations prefer “to bring employees to British Columbia on a temporary work permit” because they can be retained longer than immigrants, who have more freedom regarding where to work.

Provincial and federal immigration programs “do not tie employees to the company, whereas the temporary work permit does,” the authors say.

The number of high-tech migrants to Canada, especially from China, is likely to continue to grow in the future, say the authors.

Source: Doug Todd: “Techno-immigrants” fuel Vancouver’s high-tech sector | Vancouver Sun

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