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Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

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Re: Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

#11

Post by varun_ch »

grapeape25 wrote: post #5
windowshopping wrote: post #2

Is this new? I thought this had been the case for decades.

Not new at all. Articles have been spouting this for a long time. Anecdotally, a lot of us return to Canada after a short stint in the US. Speaking as a Waterloo grad that moved to the US for about 5 years post graduation. Many of my university classmates did something similar.

As a current Waterloo student (who is not particularly tied to any specific place). I’m curious about this and I’d like to know more. Why US for 5 years and why back?

Re: Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

#14

Post by brailsafe »

bfkwlfkjf wrote: post #6

ELI5 - Canadians can just cross the border and get a job in the USA? No need for work visa? Is that by virtue of being Canadian citizens? What are the legals?

It's easier to get a job for a company in the U.S than it is to cross the border with a job in the U.S. If you have a degree and a job, great, otherwise no

Re: Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

#15

Post by throwaway_2494 »

varun_ch wrote: post #11
grapeape25 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not new at all. Articles have been spouting this for a long time. Anecdotally, a lot of us return to Canada after a short stint in the US. Speaking as a Waterloo grad that moved to the US for about 5 years post graduation. Many of my university classmates did something similar.

As a current Waterloo student (who is not particularly tied to any specific place). I’m curious about this and I’d like to know more. Why US for 5 years and why back?

It's a myth that US income tax is always lower than in Canada.

I worked in the US for a bit when I started out. I paid more income tax in CT than in Toronto on the same salary.

I just wanted to come back home. Even in small town CT, there were areas we were told to stay away from after dark.

Re: Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

#16

Post by afavour »

varun_ch wrote: post #11
grapeape25 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not new at all. Articles have been spouting this for a long time. Anecdotally, a lot of us return to Canada after a short stint in the US. Speaking as a Waterloo grad that moved to the US for about 5 years post graduation. Many of my university classmates did something similar.

As a current Waterloo student (who is not particularly tied to any specific place). I’m curious about this and I’d like to know more. Why US for 5 years and why back?

Can’t speak for the OP but it’s often about what’s most valuable at different points in life. Depending on where you are in the US, having kids can be a formidable experience. Poor leave, expensive childcare, etc etc. It can change the calculation for whether the extra money in the US is actually worth it.

Re: Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

#17

Post by bfkwlfkjf »

Topgamer7 wrote: post #10
bfkwlfkjf wrote: post #6

ELI5 - Canadians can just cross the border and get a job in the USA? No need for work visa? Is that by virtue of being Canadian citizens? What are the legals?

The US makes it relatively easy to get a work visa if you have a science degree from a university.

Science degree from a US university you mean? I'm not trolling, genuine question.

Re: Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

#18

Post by jandrewrogers »

bfkwlfkjf wrote: post #6

ELI5 - Canadians can just cross the border and get a job in the USA? No need for work visa? Is that by virtue of being Canadian citizens? What are the legals?

TN1 visa allows Canadians to work in the US indefinitely in most professional-type roles e.g. teacher, engineer, accountant, etc. It doesn’t require much more than a job offer to get the visa.

It is a non-immigration visa so it isn’t a path to citizenship, just an American job. Many Canadians take advantage of this.

Re: Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

#20

Post by Majromax »

blindriver wrote: post #3

I'm sorry but is this an article from the late 1990s? I'm also from Canada and I know tons of Canadians that have come here since the 90s. I even known immigrants to Canada from other countries (mainly China and India) that came to the US via Canada, using the TN1 or H1B visas after getting their Canadian citizenships. The biggest problem Canada has is that any moderately successful tech worker is going to be dead-se…

> I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers

I'm not sure that Canadian taxes compare that unfavourably to combined California plus federal taxation. A deeper, more structural limitation appears to be the venture capital environment, namely that Canada doesn't have a good one.

Canada's investable capital is dominated by pension funds, insurance companies (i.e. pension funds), and banks (i.e. pensioners). All are risk averse (https://thelogic.co/news/bdc-canadian-venture-capital-report...), which makes it hard for Canadian startups to begin scaling. Without native "unicorns" (https://financialpost.com/technology/why-canada-best-startup...), there's allegedly a failure-to-launch for the entire sector – tech billionaires being some of the most reliable early-stage investors with the greatest risk tolerance.

The porous border works both for and against the sector. On one hand that makes it relatively easy (but not automatic) for a Canadian tech company to enter the US market, but on the other hand it's also relatively easy for Canadian tech workers (founders included) to simply relocate (note the article here). If startups leave for the US's vast fields of venture capital, they're less likely to come back. Note that around the turn of the year Y-Combinator halted investments in Canadian firms (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/adding-canada-back) because they so frequently relocated to the US.

This venture capital cycle seems to be a deeply-entrenched and very hard problem. If democratically feasible tax incentives could reliably create "the Silicon Valley of X," then we probably would have many more Silicon Valleys both in the US and elsewhere.

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