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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> Nice to see Toronto on the list, though game theory suggest

My bet is on Toronto because they can pick up all the staff they need worldwide without the problems of trying to get US visas.

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Same thought. Having 1 year to play the H1B lottery is not ideal, and they really hired lots of economists lately, most of which have this issue.

I thought I heard 40% of Amazon's employees are not US citizens. This all makes me think Toronoto is the #1 pick.

40% of tech workers in Seattle are foreign (from ~11% ~25 years ago). I saw this figure yesterday, and it might be what you are thinking of.

>>My bet is on Toronto because they can pick up all the staff they need worldwide without the problems of trying to get US visas.

But non-Canadian staff still need to obtain Canadian visas. I'm not sure how much easier (or not) that process is compared to the TN or H1B lottery.

It's pretty easy. If you're technically skilled and can speak English and/or French they pretty much rubber-stamp you.

Way easier. Canada's points system is a shining beacon of transparency in comparison to the US.

> without the problems of trying to get US visas

This assumes that politicians eager to get Amazon are not able to speed up and fix that process which they certainly would be motivated to do. [1]

[1] This is not 'your shitty startup with 10 employees'. It's Amazon and the brass ring.

I doubt it. Congress has failed at immigration reform for years and the current administration wants even less immigration than currently occurring.

The current administration says they want less immigration occurring, but also seems confusingly willing to cut deals that completely flying in the face of the President's public statements. There's presumably room for a deal if partisanship doesn't get in the way, because it seems as if there's no will to revoke DACA for real on anybody's (even Trump's) part.

But, it's an election year, so...

NAFTA has a provision for no-visa entry as an "internal transfer". Having a Canadian office is not unheard-of to invoke this position, by stationing an employee they really want at a US office in a Canadian office and then transferring.

While politicians may be motivated, there's no indication they would be motivated more by THIS business than by ANY OTHER business, all of which have the same concerns, have had the same concerns for years, and immigration has generally been avoided.

The L1 already works like this, and it isn't just limited to Canada. So say you work for Microsoft China for a few years, you can then get an L1 to work in the USA, which is much easier than a H1 (no cap!).

You need a Canadian passport to use nafta and that takes around 5 years at least

What US companies do in Canada is often have an office where people can work on a temp visa while waiting for their status in the US

With far-right racist and anti-immigrant sentiment rising and taking power in the US, as a brown immigrant even if you can get a visa wouldn't you be concerned about moving your life here?

They won't do this after getting bids from numerous American cities. To choose a city in Canada would piss off too much of their customer base, including the president of the country, and would have a long term material impact on sales.

Have you seen Trump's tweets about Amazon and Bezos? He's already pissed at them. Frankly if I was in their shoes I would go with Toronto also to have some sort of hedging against the US political climate.

I think that would be too incendiary a hedge. They have much more to lose than gain.

I think you're overestimating the trumples. He has an abysmal approval rating, and the types of people who tend appprove of him (e.g. rural poor) aren't exactly big spenders/prime consumers or whatever. Trump will raise a stink about it, but I'd be very surprised if anyone normal/reasonable felt Amazon opening hq2 in Canada to be like a personal attack against America or something.

Just an aside, Trump supporters are NOT poor or the working class, this is a myth. The poor are non-voters and if they vote it's mostly Democrat by and large. Trump voters for the most part were middle class suburbanites or exburbanites.

Do you have a source for this? Historically, republican voters are both poorer and less educated (which in and of itself has class implications). However, none of those demographics are relevant if they are all located in solid red states. Given that most people seem to attribute the swing state losses to the 'we need jobs' votes coming from the manufacturing and steel industries, the swing implies it's due to jobless (poor) and/or working class voters, the exact demographic you say was not the determinant.

First link on google on poor voters going Democratic:

http://www.businessinsider.com/exit-polls-who-voted-for-trum...

Every income group over $50k voted Trump. If you scroll down you see that rural voters did indeed go for Trump, but they are much smaller proportion of the population than city folk or, the largest group, suburbanites (who went for Trump solidly as well).

I don't have a source handy for the poor being largely non-voters but I've seen hundreds over the years, it's well-established fact.

>Given that most people seem to attribute the swing state losses to the 'we need jobs' votes coming from the manufacturing and steel industries

Most people might make this attribution but it is not correct.

That article doesn't support your assertion. Those are overall exit polls, not polls of swing states. The swings states are the only meaningful measure of comparison as to "why he won". The middle class are doing very well in red states like Iowa and Nebraska, but they are just as irrelevant as a billionaire in manhattan or a welfare recipient in the bronx.

In Ohio, the state that has voted for every president to win since 1964, trump won across every level of education and every level of income except the MOST poor according to exit polls.

http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/ohio/pres...

Okay, if you will only accept extremely specific tailored data on tiny fractions of the population you are perfectly capable of finding it yourself. I'll be happy to review it with you when you do.

The other responder to you has already done this for you, in fact, and the data there backs up my claims.

Plus, my main claim is that Trump voters are not the poor, they are middle-class suburbanites. My source absolutely backs that claim up.

Also, I'm not sure you understand the electoral landscape very well. Iowa is one of the more purple states, it was VERY blue for Obama and almost exactly dead even on Bush both times.

The makeup of Iowa is actually very similar to nearby Wisconsin and Michigan, which were the surprise red states that took the election for Trump.

Didn't the swing states also demand IDs which democratic supporters would not have?

A lot of the swing states are controlled by Republican state governments who impose draconian racially targeted voter suppression measures yes, but this is true in every election. 2000 was won for Bush first by deep and massive illegal voter suppression in Florida (taking people who had the right to vote off the rolls because they had a black-sounding name, for example) and only second by the Supreme Court.

The Republicans have less support nationally and in states almost every election and it is getting worse for them as time goes on, voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering are the only things keeping them in office.

You also could have never guessed Trump would win the election, right? You and I are not tapped into the minds of plenty of Americans who will absolutely feel the feeling you've described. And your assertion about "trumpies" is just not true.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...

Forget about normal/reasonable, while trump's approval rating is abysmally low going by historical standards, it's still 30 something percent - a large number in absolute terms.

Trump does not give a shit about Bezos or Amazon. The only reason he targets Bezos is because Bezos owns the Washington Post.

> Frankly if I was in their shoes I would go with Toronto also to have some sort of hedging against the US political climate.

Meh. However you feel about Trump, confidence in the US economy among businesses has been really high since his election, and even higher after the tax bill got passed. Look at what’s happening with Apple and the hundreds of other companies giving out bonuses and increasing spending in the US. Your comment might have made more sense closer to the election when everyone was making those gloom and doom predictions and nobody was sure what might really happen, but I think right now the US is more attractive to businesses than it’s probably been in a very long time.

That may be the whole point of the competition. Toronto could be the winner from before the competition even started, but holding the competition is still worthwhile. It is a way to get Toronto to cough up some goodies while simultaneously getting a way to claim that this is all Trump's fault.

I sincerely doubt the majority of their customer base cares at all, and it would almost certainly have very little impact on sales.

I sincerely doubted that Hillary would lose the election, and we know how that went. You're probably right in that the majority of their customer base wouldn't care at all. However, even if 10% care, not an unreasonable guess, that would absolutely have a large material impact on sales.

The placement of the HQ in Toronto would be branded as a betrayal of America. I think the NFL/Papa Johns case could end up being similar --> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/12/21/p...

Yeah and they already have offices all over the world so it's a nonissue.

The difference with those offices is they didn't tease 20+ US cities before building them. It's a nonissue to you, but it won't be to millions of Americans.

How many Americans are "pissed off" that their American cars are made in Canada?

They don't even know where their stuff is made any more. Toyota makes cars in Kentucky, Texas, Indiana, Alabama, West Virgina and Mississippi, but they're an "import". Ford makes vehicles in Mexico and Canada but they're "domestic".

Your point is valid, however no car factory built recently has garnered a fraction of the publicity/public interest that HQ2 has. What people don't know can't hurt them.

Nobody cares about HQ2 outside of certain tech circles.

My point is people care more about where their cars are made, and they don't even really care about that.

I wouldn’t be so sure of that. My parents, who are both in their 60s and not the least bit affiliated with technology, are both aware of Amazon’s headquarters search and brought it up with me when I was visiting over the holidays.

This is false. This whole process has been huge news. It's front page on sites like Washington Post, Philly.com, and the IndyStar and I've just checked multiple non tech forums where it's one of the busiest topics today.

A single day of news is not "news". Everyone's already moved on to the US government shutdown and more nonsense about emails and ISIS.

If nobody cares about HQ2, then why is it all over the news? You're underestimating it's reach.

Even if people wouldn't normally care, they will care now because of the publicity and bidding process that has taken place. People in cities who do not win will be upset when they lose, and people everywhere, including places that were never in the running, will be upset if they put the office in Canada. You must not have heard of the "America first" line of thinking that got trump elected, in part.

Oh, you think people read the news. You're overestimating how much that matters.

This will blow over in months and be totally forgotten.

Part of me says that if they wanted to set up shop in Toronto they would have just done it, and not gone out of their way to attract attention like they have.

But on the other hand, if they want to run a PR campaign on the basis of "we seriously considered many US cities, and Toronto was a better option", they're certainly putting in the groundwork for that.

It's probably just going through their "due diligence" so they can pull the pin on a non-US but "North American" location. If they want to hire the best in the world it's easier to get visas for working in Toronto, and the path to citizenship is pretty straightforward.

I think your analysis is a bit Amerocentric. They said they wanted a second HQ in “North America” and received several Canadian bids, all but one of which failed to make the cut.

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