Canada to lure Silicon Valley techies struggling with immigration issues

Canada’s minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism arrived in the Bay area last Friday determined to spread the message that his country is open for business.

In a Vancouver interview before he left, Jason Kenney told the media that the dysfunctional US immigration system is now common knowledge worldwide, adding that he intends to make it clear that highly-skilled tech workers are more than welcome in Canada. The Canadian system, he said, gives its own equivalent of a green card on arrival to suitable candidates.

Kenney’s campaign to attract the brightest and the best in IT began in San Francisco’s Bay Area, and was a four-day concerted effort to persuade Silicon Valley workers to breathe new life into Canada’s high-tech economy. The main visa on offer is the country’s new start-up entrepreneurship offering, complete with permanent residency but dependent on sponsorship to help a business in the US’s northern neighbour.

During his tour, Kenney met with Stanford students and tech executives as well as running the Canadian booth at Santa Clara’s TiEcon entrepreneurship conference last weekend. Chair of UC Berkeley’s Canadian studies programme, Irene Bloemraad, said that many skilled foreign tech employees in Silicon Valley are as yet unable to get permanent legal status after their six-year H-IB visas come to an end.

Kenney is emphasising that unrestricted permanent residency in Canada is on offer in exchange for much-needed tech skills, removing the restrictions imposed by US immigration on changing jobs away from initial sponsors which prevent upward mobility in the sector. The option, Kenney says, is north of the 49th parallel.