While U.S. immigration restrictions introduced late last week are bringing the stateside technology industry together in outrage, some Canadians see a positive ripple effect on tech recruitment and investment north of the border.
“Canada has an opportunity to be a country where the best talent from around the world can move here and do their life’s work as never before,” said Alexandra Clark, director of policy and government affairs at Ottawa-based e-commerce platform Shopify.
She said the country must focus on incentives to lure foreign skilled workers, adding in an email that “talent is not defined by borders and if they choose to come to Canada, the entire ecosystem will be better for it.”
Allen Lau, CEO of Toronto-based online storytelling app Wattpad, said along with measures recently unveiled by Ottawa to shorten the immigration process for foreign-born tech workers, “what Donald Trump is doing actually may actually help Canada.”
He said the U.S. president’s travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority nations could at least partially bridge a substantial gap in tech talent in Canada.
And Lau said that the travel ban is already having an impact. “Americans who I know have contacted me, and are looking at what are other countries they might want to move to,” he said, although he called it premature to speculate about tech companies moving north to flee Trump.
Canada’s technology community urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week to snap up industry workers caught in Trump’s border crackdown, saying embracing diversity drives innovation and the economy. Dozens of the country’s tech chief executive officers signed a letter asking Canada to offer immediate entry visas to those hit by the order.
“In choosing to hire, train, and mentor the best people in the world, we can build global companies that grow our economy,” said the letter, which included signatures from Shopify’s Tobi Lutke, an immigrant from Germany, and Hootsuite Media’s Ryan Holmes. “By embracing diversity, we can drive innovation to benefit the world.’’
The letter follows a move by Trudeau’s government last year to create a fast-track visa program that would let tech companies bring international workers into the country in two weeks rather than having to deal with the usual months-long bureaucratic slog.
Stephen Green of Toronto-based Green and Spiegel LLP said that his immigration law firm has taken calls since Friday from cross-border companies asking about the process of moving some of their workers to Canada amid U.S. unpredictability.
Green said he has also fielded calls from manufacturers considering relocation, adding that he believes engineering schools here could also benefit in terms of foreign student enrollment gains.
Ben Baldwin, a Toronto-based entrepreneur who founded ScaleDriver, a service that pairs traditional Fortune 500 companies with innovators from the Toronto-Waterloo, Ont., tech corridor and Silicon Valley, said the immediate impact of the Trump administration’s tough stance on immigration is to focus the media spotlight on Canada and its welcoming attitude.
“If you’re a talented individual who is considering moving somewhere and you see a community embracing you for humanitarian reasons, that’s a powerful factor. We know that this is going to benefit us.”
BlackBerry Ltd. CEO John Chen, meanwhile, said in a statement Monday that Trump’s travel ban will hurt trade, adding that “it gives us a little bit of a leg up in attracting talent to Canada.” Chen noted that more than half of Waterloo-based BlackBerry’s executive team and many of its employees, including Chen, are immigrants.
Trump signed an executive order Friday that doesn’t allow citizens from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Libya to enter the U.S. for 90 days.
Chen said the move will make it more difficult to conduct business globally, adding that more than half of BlackBerry’s executive team, including himself, and many of the company’s employees are immigrants.
U.S. tech giants including Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and Amazon all have sizable offices in Canada and immigration already plays a key role in their presence: the companies have been known to bring workers to Canada from South Asia or Eastern Europe to get them closer to headquarters while they wait for them to clear more stringent U.S. visa requirements.
Google Canada has nearly 1,000 employees (from Canada and around the world) in Montreal, Toronto and Waterloo.
“Our engineers work on global teams building products that are used by billions of people — and we have some of the world’s leading researchers in AI (artificial intelligence) based in Montreal and Toronto,” a spokesperson said Monday.
“Part of the reason the Toronto-Waterloo technology sector is such a powerful force is the strength and diversity of its leadership.”
Toronto Mayor John Tory, meanwhile, added his voice to those encouraging the tech sector to continue fostering “the inclusive, accepting culture that helps drive innovation in the Toronto Region. I will continue to work with all levels of government to make sure our country remains a safe haven for those in need,” he said in an email.
And even though the Trump travel ban isn’t an immediate threat to businesses in the U.S., emotions are running high because it violates Silicon Valley’s self-image of inclusion and tolerance.
More than any other industry, the tech enclave embraces the work and aspirations of immigrants. At least half of the top 20 U.S. tech companies were founded or are currently led by someone who came from another country.
The late Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, is the biological son of an immigrant from Syria, one of the countries targeted by the Trump administration. The chief executive officers of Microsoft and Google were both born in India. Among start-ups, 51 per cent of those valued at more than $1 billion (U.S.) had an immigrant as co-founder, according to a paper by the National Foundation for American Policy.
“This is essentially a direct attack at what we consider to be incredibly important to our culture and how we built our companies,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box Inc.
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