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Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

s/most/some

I was an expat in the US for many years, the story was the same in the mid-90s. Many try it, some stay, some come back. I still work for a US company but moved back.

The current political climate has a big impact on encouraging people to stay in Canada, especially with NAFTA and the H1B programs hanging by a thread. Imagine thousands of Canadians with TN status getting told they need to move back immediately (More likely 30-60 days after a status change application) upon withdrawal from NAFTA. It will be a chaotic brain drain in reverse.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google all have large Canadian outposts lately for a reason.

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I know Google Waterloo has some actual permanent engineering teams but Microsoft and Amazon Canada seem to be strictly L-1 visa farms.

The political climate is much talked about but if anything the rate of brain drain has increased as more and more SV companies make an effort to recruit in Toronto. In the early 2000s the subset of US companies that recruited at all in Canada did it strictly at UW. Now all the majors have a campus presence at even mid-tier Canadian schools like UVic.

Amazon must have nearly 400 R&D people in Toronto now. Probably 300 when I left. I was always involved in recruiting and Amazon hires the best from all over the world and probably over 70% of the engineers were from Waterloo and the new comers are mostly from Europe, plus we got a few returning from US Amazon as well. There is always some who wanted to move to Seattle after 3-4 years but the number is like 1 in 15..

L-1 farm is entirely too cynical, most hires I know at AWS or Google Toronto have zero interest in leaving Canada. At Pivotal we have a number of US people doing transfers INTO Canada lately.

This is not to say transfers south are not done... but it's not the primary purpose of having a Canadian presence.

That reason has nothing to do with those. It's to get around H1-B Visa caps by transferring them after a year.

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