U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada
npr.org
npr.org
From my experience on the media / marketing side of things, a lot of people moving here that didn't consider the U.S. as an option. For some roles, our entire crop of interviewees have moved to Canada from other countries.
Yes, the U.S. immigration situation is helping the Canadian tech scene, but cities like Vancouver and Toronto are more than a mere crashpad for people waiting to move to SV. There's real momentum here as well.
[0] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/practitioner-profe...
I was under the impression generics are molecular identical? How do they differ when the name brand version says on the pack, for example, temazepam 10mg, and the generic version says the same thing?
Look into the "Warning Letters" database for generics producers vs. branded. It's ridiculous the amount of things generics producers get away with (contaminated product, improper facility maintenance, improper purity and potency oversight, poor quality control).
They're not the same thing. No matter how many laymen -- or worse actual medical professionals who think they know pharma just because they sell pills -- parrot the "fillers causing side-effects" bullshit.
The only thing generics providers need to do is establish a very loose bioequivalency through self-tested experiments (the FDA doesn't conduct the experiments or oversees them, only reviews the results and methodology). Once accepted, shady decisions are easy to cover up, since the FDA only does visits infrequently.
It's like buying on Amazon. You could get the original brand's product or some knock-off. Except in this case, the knock-off is state-supported.
Though buying brand may not protect you from this. Brand name companies change up plants, processes, API suppliers, etc. without notifying end-users. They just do the same kind of testing a generic supplier may.
They have the same pressures to reduce cost as much as a generic manufacturer does.
There are optical isomers and such that could make a difference. But even the brand names may change this up from time to time.
Then there's the whole 99% pure thing, but that 1% could be made up of highly carcinogenic nitrosamines in the microgram doses that aren't as closely tracked as they should be. But buying brand may not protect you from this, or could be worse.
Canada is a nice place, live there if you want, but “competitive compensation” is definitely not a reason.
On a more serious note, you should learn about how the media works.
One person gets stabbed in SF for $5 and it makes the news, and then people like you believe that every one of the 884k people living in SF get stabbed.
You probably also believe that all Teslas easily catch on fire? Cause you saw it on the news?
Please learn about statistics and sensationalist media.
If you look at levels.fyi Amazon seems to be paying around 180k TC for SD2 in Vancouver. I would rather live in Vancouver with 180K than in the US with 250k.
(Am talking local currencies as when I am living in a country I spend the money in local currency.)
That is ~$62k/year and is absurdly low in Toronto unless it was an early-stage startup.
There's really nothing like working in the Valley but not everyone likes it and if there's a solid alternative I suspect that Vancouver and Toronto will continue to prosper no matter what the US policies end up being.
Edit: "Bay Curious" podcast https://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious
I would think the great weather for filming and access to many kinds of terrain would is benefit New York can’t offer.
Even before the move to Hollywood the center of the US film industry wasn't New York, but just across the river in Fort Lee, NJ.
There’s a lot of historical analysis of this.
Spend any time browsing /r/vancouver or /r/toronto and you'll quickly realize that the cost of living is a huge problem. The Vancouver housing market in particular has been absurdly inflated by out of control money laundering. Local salaries and house prices are totally out of whack.
Follow https://twitter.com/mortimer_1/ to see what money laundering has done to the Vancouver housing market. https://twitter.com/mortimer_1/status/1221315000897163264 is a particularly amusing recent thread showing where a would-be landlord writes: "This home is in rough shape and needs painting, and TLC. Looking for long term tenant willing to put labour in while landlord covers all material costs." All this for only $5650/month!
Vancouver salaries are also lower than almost all of Canada's metros, while having the highest property costs. Vancouver also has the best weather. The Canadian metro with the best opportunity and lowest comparative costs is Montreal.
Not that you actually own that property value in Vancouver. If you run away and go work somewhere else for a year, and don't rent it, you owe Vancouver a hefty empty home tax.
You have only 30 million people, living on an island continent the size of the United States. And is the country with probably the longest warm water coastline on the planet.
Something like 85% of the population lives within 50km of the coastline.
Install some solar panels, and use it to crack water, to make hydrogen, and convert it to ammonia. Australia can power the next fuel cell revolution.
I'm not sure efficiency matters that much when you have far more energy production capacity than you need but it's concentrated in places and times where you can't use it.
As for costing more: compared to what ? Batteries don't seem like an economically effective option for storing solar energy at massive scale, do they ? And in any case they don't allow the stored energy to be shipped to other locations.
Run some numbers and you find batteries are surprisingly cheap at grid scale. Grid solar is already tied into the grid and does DC>AC conversion anyway as part of it’s 2c/kWh pricing. So, rather than AC>DC>AC>DC you can just use solar panel’s AC power directly. Which means your just adding minimal cabling, batteries, some electronics, and a basic box for weather protection. So, ~100,000$ for 200kWh of storage x ~5,000 cycles that’s 10c/kWh for storage + (2c/kWh solar / 90% efficiency) = ~12.2c/kWh.
Granted that ignoring some real world costs like interest payments, but battery costs are also dropping so it’s a reasonable ballpark. Especially vs a theoretical system that’s never been scaled.
PS: By comparison if your at 50% efficiency to chemical storage and world record 63% thermal efficiency at combustion that’s 2 /.5 /.63 = ~6.3/kWh just for electricity plus the cost of your combined cycle gas turbine and chemical plant.
EDIT: I think for that use case you'll find that a reasonable technology doesn't exist for transporting electrons over that distance (I don't think there are any superconducting transmission lines in actual use) but pipelines have been around for a long time.
I think I've heard that with current solar cells you could produce that much power with a 100 mile x 100 mile installation in a sunny location.
If battery storage and power transmission are solved problems, are the obstacles now only economic ?
IMO, we are headed to about 70% renewables in 30 years baring major changes.
They recently started putting together an interstate connector to other states, which allows the state to export excess power from renewables. In part to help offset grid reductions as NSW brings some of it's fossil fuel plants offline. They already have had some 100% renewable days, but plan to be 100% renewable by 2030.
Another quirk of SA's energy history was Elon Musk offering to help solve grid costly instability with a battery solution within 100 days or it was free. Odd tactic, but it happened and they have a 100MW battery reserve in Hornsdale that is set to expand to 150MW.
Out of the 8 zones, zones 3 and 4 don't seem to inhabitable, they're probably the "outback" aka desert. 1 seems to be the subtropical jungle bits. They're huge, however doing a silly size comparison with Romania, which has around 20 million people ( https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!NzkwMTU3Mg.NDI0MDg2OQ*M... ), it seems that even considering just the temperate zones, Australian population density is low.
I guess it's more an issue of bad urban planning because of economic pressures. Everyone bunches up in the same centers of population, which cover a very small area, in relative terms.
Another aspect is we quite simply have an inflated market, driven by foreign investment, speculators, government policies and incentives that help investors at the expense of home buyers. We also have thousands of citizens with outsized investments in real estate, and the government is doing everything it can to make sure that house of cards doesn't topple down and cause a recession.
One of our last government's policies to "Help ease house prices" was to give grants to corporate investors, so that they could buy up land and rent it back to people. That's the kind of policy making we have here at the moment
Granted if you want to buy a house, Australia (especially Sydney) is expensive for a bunch of reasons (negative gearing etc). But Toronto is still more expensive than Melbourne and Vancouver is much more expensive.
For comparison, that is the cost of renting a one bedroom condo (downtown) in Toronto:
* https://rentals.ca/national-rent-report
* https://dailyhive.com/toronto/monthly-rent-predictions-toron...
The winters of the few years I spent living in Vancouver were the best in my life. I still go back (from the UK) now and then to enjoy it.
The average IT salaries where I live are in the ballpark of 70-100k Canadian Dollars (CAD) -- at least according to Indeed.ca, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor. Given a 20-30% currency difference that's capping out at around $80K US Dollars (USD). Not terrible by US national standards, but not impressive for tech; i.e EMC offered me $66k USD out of college in 2008.
Meanwhile, on Reddit's r/networking, or r/sysadmin, where they have periodic salary surveys, network engineers in NoVA or Chicago are pulling $105k-115 USD with only 5 years experience and a CCNA -- and that's just an average, you can often do way better.
In Calgary the highest salaries were related to oil companies, and for tech they seemed to cap out at around $150K CAD for SCADA devs, instrumentation specialists, etc. I'm sure there are higher paying gigs available, but you're getting into specialized, only-found-by-word-of-mouth roles.
I've been lucky to be remote for the past 5 years, working for US firms, but if I wasn't it would probably be close to a 50% pay cut, on top of a higher cost of living. The COL wouldn't shock someone from NoVA or Seattle or Chicago but it's higher than you'd think.
Re: Ottawa -- I'd assume that, like Washington DC, the government contracting and federal bureaucracy are effectively their own mini employment universe that plays by their own rules, and doesn't reflect the rest of the country (e.g. security clearances mean your job can't be outsourced to India). Source: am from DC originally.
Not in Toronto.
May be it's my bias but Toronto doesn't feel all that multi cultural. Sure you see people of different nationalities but something feels lacking.
Toronto is more of a finance town, with tech tacked on. NYC is similar.
> May be it's my bias but Toronto doesn't feel all that multi cultural. Sure you see people of different nationalities but something feels lacking.
Curious, what cities around the world feel multicultural to you? I've lived in many multicultural cities and my criteria may be different from yours, so genuinely interested to hear your thoughts.
Toronto's immigrants are much newer and Toronto's reputation for multiculturalism is actually only a few decades old (there hasn't been time for a deep multicultural identity to emerge). Multiculturalism entered the national conversation in 1971. In the decades prior to that, Toronto was very much still a stodgy Anglo-Saxon enclave, with Montreal being the multicultural hub of Canada.
That said, certain large global demographics are underrepresented in London (east Asians for instance, but not south Asians). Hispanics are underrepresented in Toronto.
I feel NYC is the only city in the world where most of the world's major demographics are on balance well-represented.
Singapore is actually not that multicultural (there are only four major races/cultures). I would say it's more international than multicultural, because the residual diversity come from people who are expats rather than immigrants.
It's inconclusive at best, and misidentifying the major causes in this complicated crisis could hurt any effort to alleviate housing pains.
Money laundering does happen in BC, and some of the proceeds do go into higher end housing. One can argue the restrictive zoning and ever-increasing costs and hurdles to new developments are orders of magnitude more influential on the market than the hot money. We have heavily left-leaning councilors in Vancouver that vote down any rental property project, solely to prevent private parties from making any profit.
Well, the climate in the populated parts of Canada parallels the northern United States, i.e. Chicago (9.5m in metro area) and Toronto (6.4m in metro area) have similar climate, as well as Vancouver and Seattle.
There are huge populations in these areas who are used to northern climate and have no trouble with it. I live in Chicago and really love the four seasons, prefer the cold to the heat and would never move to anywhere south of say North Carolina.
Climate preferences can vary quite a bit, I would say.
Toronto has more construction towers (120) than any other city in North America (49 in SFO and LAX):
* https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/economic/2019/0...
It's still not keeping up with demand.
Well, India and China have even fewer immigration restrictions on Indian and Chinese workers than Canada does... why would Vancouver take San Francisco’s place rather than Mumbai or Shanghai?
In fact in the last few years I've even been seeing young people coming up from the USA to live here for lifestyle reasons.
IMO the dominant thing propelling tech in Vancouver forward isn't the immigration law situation, but rather the low Canadian dollar makes our companies cheap to work with for SF giants.
The real problem is all the other nonsense people have to deal with.
We have a really great employee who single handedly wrote most of the company’s build infrastructure, and was happy in the US on his H1B because while it requires renewal every 3 years, he was well paid and enjoying his life.
Until about a year and a half ago when he went back to renew his visa in India but didn’t get an approval for about 6 months. The approval process required the company to submit the salaries of the entire 15000+ global employees from the janitors to the CEO.
Once his visa was approved, he packed his bags and moved to Toronto within a couple of months. And our company has stopped hiring more tech workers in the US because they don’t want to have to deal with this anymore.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/386...
Therefore, someone from India can't just "start H1B to green card conversion process."
If we simply removed country caps from the current system then it would be dominated by certain countries with the highest pay difference. The smartest scientist in Germany would be waiting in line behind hundreds of thousands of far-less-skilled programmers from developing countries willing to work for at-or-below market rates (in a hot market where salaries would otherwise be rising faster).
Also, smartest scientist will still get the priority via EB1 instead of lowly engineers who will get the EB3 category. This is already accounted for in the current system. so we are really talking about two lowly engineers in Germany vs India. Do you agree they should have to wait for same amount of years for employment based GC? How about two scientists from China and tiny country of Monaco?
Yes a points system is obviously better but can be manipulated, particularly in developing countries without consistent school quality. As soon as a process to get visas is created it becomes an adversarial game to beat the system. I wouldn't rate their degrees equal. India's "engineering" degrees, for example, in my view are more akin to associate's degrees in engineering technology or such. It's all multiple choice and cramming. Even if we ignore how easy such an approach is to cheat, it doesn't teach them useful skills anyway. So if they were really assessed accurately I wouldn't expect many from India to match graduates from Germany, apart from those who attend school in the west.
China has a lot more solid schools, at least in my area, though a lot of rampant cheating and everything else too.
China also has probably 1000x schools, so even by law of averages, there would more scientists coming out from there compared to Monaco. And I would leave that to companies to figure out whether a candidate is actually good enough to be their employee or if they "cheated".
> Even the smartest scientist would probably have better odds of getting in via the EB3 category than EB1.
I don't understand the point. I explained that. Anyone in EB1 gets here before anyone on EB3.
About rest of your comment, I never said two bachelors degrees should be counted the same. Having a masters or PhD in a US university or having worked at a US based company should count much higher.
Anyway, it seems pointless saying anything more at this point since you seem to have a lot of issues with the points based system but you fail to see any issues with the current system. Have a nice day.
Sauce for the goose == sauce for the gander
sauce for the goose==sauce for the gander
These other countries are free to try and improve their conditions. Trying to drag us down to their level is pathetic.
QED
There is a way to improve this situation -- allow H1B workers to easily change employers.
Alternatively, employing an H1B requires paying into a tuition scholarship fund. $50k/year sounds reasonable to me.
And no amount of tuition assistance is going to make more than a handful of the kids I grew up with capable of this work.
The US skims some of the best students and programmers from around the world, but also people who are equivalent but cheaper, and also indentured.
Exactly. The latter needs to be shut off.
How do you know that?
I always suffer a bit of second-hand embarrassment when others earnestly accept such crude propaganda.
It's all about protecting access to cheap labor.
If they have trouble bringing people to the US, it's a bigger incentive to do so.
There are also good reasons to want to employ people who are 'closer to the client'. Plenty of places have engineers both in the US and elsewhere. Lots of companies just want to employ the best talent from wherever.
Make those things difficult though, and software is about the easiest industry to route the work abroad.
And as for the supply, everyone talks about US grads not going into STEM as if it's a law of nature. If salaries were allowed to keep going up during these temporary hot markets, more of the best and brightest would be attracted away from medicine/law (the current default choices for top students). STEM has always been a stepping-stone for the lower-middle class, not a particularly prestigious profession in my lifetime (at least compared to what someone of the same intelligence could have otherwise done). Now it is being turned into a stepping stone for the middle class from developing countries, again driving those domestic students away. (I work in education and see this every day).
I think you are failing to grasp that this is a global market for talent. Sure, being local helps some, but if the disparity is too great, companies will move. Also, there is not a fixed lump of labor to go around.
Also there needs to be sufficient talent available across all roles needed, to completely move the company to a new location. As opposed to just a lot at the low end of skills. The cost and other downsides of that move would also be immense.
Perhaps one day remote work will be far more common, and I think this would be a good thing, by the way. I also think brain drain is bad overall. Developing countries need those productive residents far more than the west does.
Folks in the office have to rent/buy property, buy food, supplies, etc, all from local workers too. Taxes are paid. You know, business.
Note that this mostly applies to immigrants from India or China. I'm from India. This applies irrespective of education level (I did my Bachelors in the US, just FYI)
Currently I'm in the US on a student visa (currently during a period of that visa that permits me to work) that expires in a couple years. I cannot renew it. If I want to continue working in the US. My only option is an H1-B (work) visa.
There is basically no other option to me.
Okay, so let's say I do get the H1-B visa. Then, I have to work for a few more years on that visa, before I'm eligible to apply for a green card - which grants permanent resident status. Now, once I file that application, I'll be on a waitlist. Guess how much time it takes to get a greed card? Atleast 100 years. I'm not joking. Unless there's a policy change, there's no possibility.
Even if there's no possibility of me getting a green card, I can still work. I can still buy a house, get married, have kids, etc. A lot of Indians and Chinese in the US currently are in this limbo period, where they don't have a green card. So they still continue to work, start a family. Because no other country will pay as well.
But personally, I hate the uncertainty. While even getting a green card isn't a guarantee to get to stay in the country, not having a green card is much worse. A CBP officer has the authority to deny you entry at their discretion. If do deny entry, you are banned from entry for atleast 5 years.
That's it. You're life in the US has vanished into thin air.
While I love my current job, I trying to immigrate to Canada. You get a PR immediately if you quality based on a points system calculated using specific, meritocratic criteria. If I have a PR I feel I won't worry when I buy a house, plant roots, that my life won't be upended because I failed to follow my visa's restrictions.
I'm surprised at the amount of confidence you have in the USCIS that you might get a greed card. If you are still on a visa, I don't see how soon you believe you can get a green card in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not sure you can use the EB-1 category even with an L-1 - unless you're at a very high level in your company. Even for that category, the waitlist is currently about 5 years.
It doesn't have to be a L1. Even with a H1B, if you worked as a manager in India and come here with a manager title (even Project Manager), you can apply in EB1 as a multinational manager. It's a terrible loophole and one that's mercilessly exploited.
Those days are gone now. You go into EB-1 only if you get into the US on L1-A. They don't give L1-A's easily these days. For starters you need to be in director level positions to even qualify for L1-A's. Even then the waiting period for India EB-1 itself is growing and stands at 5+ years now. And it will only increase.
>>I've quite a few friends who easily got their green cards working for TCS, Infosys, etc.
Put the saddle on the right horse. People who come in from those companies often work for <$70K an year. Most are poor blokes who survive on ramen, and giving haircuts to each other so that they can save $8.
The real deal is Cgnzt which even until recently filed L1-A's and EB-1's for thousands/lacs of people by cooking up documents. Often promoting some one with a BCom degree to a director, granting them a GC and then rolling back the promotion. Thousands to lacs have made it to GC and Passports this way. When I worked for a short time in the US, it was painful to see PhD students in Stanford struggle for little extra stay, while some one with a basic 2 year diploma land GCs in like an year. In fact even until recently the biggest incentive to work at Cgnzt was this.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
8.4 lac Indians got citizenship only last year. 5.8 lac got green cards. This is basically abuse max.
Add this to manager's pets who routinely get their documents cooked to be Nobel Prize worthy talent and land GC's. Literally the wrongest possible people occupy the numbers these days. Add to this a large number of body shopping firms.
There are several top level doctors, lawyers and scientists who don't even get B1's.
In short we Indians bought this upon ourselves. Like everything else. We abuse things so much, so far and so blatantly it makes things impossible for the real people when they arrive at the scene.
I'm one of those people who got burned badly due to all these politics at every level. I have largely given up, you just need to get very lucky early life to win at these things. Or cheat shamelessly.
That was the total number of citizenships granted last year. Indians were about 50k of that total - approximately 6%. That's from the article you linked.
But the part about abuse still stands. Basically get married to an American, or be lucky to be a part of some one time abuse drive.
I was with you till here. No, we did not bring this to ourselves. The answer is that USA has dumb policies.
Oh well, yeah. That part is true to some extent. But I can only comment on things we have control on. And to some extent a system with some specific rules needs to be used the way it was intended. We can't exactly say, we have a right to do what we like(in this case, cheat) especially when these things work like resources in a common pool. I can absolutely understand if some thing like this happened less than a percent. But the moment you enter double digit percentages of abuse/fraud, you are just hurting every one else. Expecting the other party to just offer an infinite pool of resources to accomodate our doing just adds to the anti-immigrant sentiment that is going around. Please note there are also people from other countries here.
Beyond this. Every system needs to work with a degree of fairness and merit, immigration is same.
On the shorter run, I do see someone putting a fix to these things and making things harder for every one else just to stop this abuse. On the longer I can see there will be increased pressure from economic centers all over the world, because every one is fighting for talent concentration at one place. This will lead to more liberal immigration policies.
And contrary to what our American friends believe it's hard to believe they will be the only country with economic centers attractive to everyone. Paris, London and Berlin have a growing tech scene. Then there's also Singapore and Dubai. Canada is another destination.
Beyond this the Chinese Bay Area(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong-Hong_Kong-Macau_Grea...) - Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area. Seems to be especially designed to take on Western Economic Centers. They are building state of the art infrastructure. Roads, Railways, affordable housing and top notch Airports. They'll be fighting for the talent pie, and with their demographics on the decline, attracting top notch foreign talent with be a Chinese government priority too. I don't expect them granting them citizenships. But liberal Dubai style 99 year visas on owning a home are possible. And a lot of the world talent will want to work there.
The way I see America will only eventually succumb to the pressure and might have to open up immigration again.
They also offer employment abroad as a carrot to incentivize employees sticking with them for long periods of time in unfavorable conditions(Most co.s have high attrition rates - due to the low salaries). The companies also maintain a bond : you have to pay the company if you quit before completing 'x' years of service per contract. They withhold your experience certificate if you don't; a common requirement of any new company you hop ship to.
Most outsourced tech work is manual dreary labor. I've been on that side for 2 years.
If it wasn’t for that, 80% of people getting green cards would be Indian and Chinese.
The abuse of the h1b and GC process by these coding/consultancy sweat shops is truly despicable. Every competent Indian I know, hates them. Every American seems to hate them.
They seem to have support from neither Democrats (for shit wages) nor Republicans (because most people here are immigrants). What is stopping them for getting their comeuppance.
Why not sanction them in particular ? If it is so blatant to the consumer, it should be fairly blatant for a Government auditor.
If you wait long enough your US citizen kid can sponsor your green card as an "immediate relative" once they turn 18 :-)
The backlog for Indians and Chinese is truly ridiculous though.
Please stop subverting our laws, you’re making it worse for people who don’t break the law.
For people looking for data backing what I'm talking about, here's[1] something that everyone looks at to track timelines. This data is released monthly. Search for "EMPLOYMENT-BASED PREFERENCES"
In that table you'll see China, India and Mexico specifically called out since they're the ones with such extreme wait times. EB-1 is extremely difficult to qualify for[2] so most people apply for EB-2. You can see currently applications from 2009 are being processed. That was more than a decade ago. Then consider the increase in applications each year since that year. That's where the 100 year figure comes from.
[1]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
[2]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-worker...
So my entire family migrated from India (not H1B though, so no idea what that process is like), and some are still migrating, and this is just ridiculous. Green cards and citizenship are issued quite regularly. I'm not going to say its fast, but it's not literally 100 years (can't tell if you were being sarcastic or not). My uncle got his a few years back, and got his citizenship this year. The system works, as long as there're no discrepancies.
[1] - friends and my roommate here in the bay [2] - my application
Full blown citizenship is another matter, you’d have to give up your US citizenship, which still has its benefits. I can say with a great amount of certainty the US government cares a lot more for its citizens than other governments of the world, whose governments are usually outright hostile to their own citizenry/populace.
Not disputing how ridiculous your situation is, but you do have a couple other options.
The most realistic one would be to save up all your money and apply for the eb5 investor visa. If you're making 6 figures, you should be able to save up the required million dollars in about 10-20 years, depending on how much you make, and how frugal you're willing to live.
The other possibility is you marrying someone who isn't born in India. If you did that, you can use your partner's country of birth instead of your own, when waiting for the priority date. But obviously this isn't something you can plan for, and I wouldn't recommend letting this guide your life decisions.
The last option is progressing your career to the point where you can mount a realistic eb1 application. I've heard anecdotally that it's very hard, but not as hard as people may think it is. If you work at it over a 10-20 year time frame, it may be very realistic.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
Last year, the State Department (which runs the bulletin and has all the numbers) said[1] 8.4 years for India EB-5 until visa number availability. It then takes around a year to actually get the physical green card. So, 10 years is a good estimate for someone applying today.
1. The last slide of https://iiusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/IIUSA-2019-EB5-...
I'm an early career engineer, and this is something that a few of my friends have looked into. The number was 500k when I started working 3 years ago. It's now 800k. It looks like how much ever I work, the number will increase faster than I can save, cause there will be more people like me. Unless I become sufficiently senior and comparatively rich like a VP, I can't realistically beat the trend.
> The other possibility is you marrying someone who isn't born in India. If you did that, you can use your partner's country of birth instead of your own, when waiting for the priority date. But obviously this isn't something you can plan for, and I wouldn't recommend letting this guide your life decisions.
This is true. Your tradeoff point hits the nail on the head. I have heard some cases of people feeling like they were married to just for the GC, and some from the other side who stand some abuse. But your broad point stands.
> The last option is progressing your career to the point where you can mount a realistic eb1 application. I've heard anecdotally that it's very hard, but not as hard as people may think it is. If you work at it over a 10-20 year time frame, it may be very realistic.
Need to progress outside the US though. Unless I become a Carmack/Jeff Dean/famous inventor, the logic of the law seems to suggest that if I could rise to this position here, then an American could too. That's why the EB-1 has an allocation for applicants who became managers outside the US and transferred in.
I have upvoted you and I feel you make some great points. I wanted to iron out some details in case a third person was reading this.
The number was 500k for almost 30 years, without any increases for inflation at all. No one can predict whether it will increase again in future, but going solely off of history, there's a very good chance it will stay at the current numbers for a while.
> Unless I become a Carmack/Jeff Dean/famous inventor
I have personally met people who have successfully gotten the EB-1 without being nearly as successful as the examples you gave. If you're as successful as the average FANG employee, and have ~5-10+ years of work experience, you might have a realistic shot. I would recommend talking to some people who have gone through this process first hand, before dismissing it.
As I noted in my comment, I can stay here for a while hoping for some way of getting a green card. It's those 10-20 years that I don't want to endure, with which again I need extreme luck (I would consider me saving up $1MM within 10 years or becoming a EB-1 level 'multi-national manager' not a guarantee).
If I did go the Canada route, I can do these things there (making $1MM or becoming an C-suite executive) - however unlikely those goals are, while not risking having my life uprooted. Canada doesn't pay as high as US, but then again I don't have to worry about going back to India (where jobs don't pay as well as either US or Canada) and finding a job there without notice.
Staying at the same job, my salary will go from $180k usd to $128k usd ($170k cad). (Equity comp remains the same)
That's a pretty big cut, though at least for me it's worth it because of non-monetary reasons, like being closer to family, not dealing with immigration anymore, healthcare/education.
The money stuff isn't so bad. A downtown Toronto condo is a lot cheaper than San Francisco. That alone makes the pay cut easy enough to swallow. Either way I can comfortably live on a tech salary.
Starting prices for:
3 Bed SF condo: 1.2M usd
3 Bed TO condo: 0.7M usd (900k cad)
No rigorous comparison, just from me house hunting in both markets.
As a friend from out that way put it, "its harder to be a consumer there, but easier to be a human".
This rings true but it depends on what kind of human you are (I lived in Montreal for many years and enjoyed it there, but did not see myself living there long term). It's easier to be lower middle class, an artist, a student, a chef, a government employee, etc. in Montreal, but if you're at all an ambitious human, Montreal has less for you.
Apart from the universities (there's one that is highly-ranked internationally), it's not the kind of city that attracts go-getters (exceptions exist of course -- the tech scene these days, though still not comparable to major U.S. cities, is much different from when I was there).
Montrealers feel less of an economic struggle (more joie-de-vivre and love of the simple life, rents are controlled, CoL is low), but the existential struggle to fit in (if you're not pur-laine Quebecois), to find community (if you don't speak French at near native levels) and to find meaningful work (if you're at the top of your profession) is far more pronounced if you're ambitious.
Being fully human (for me) means being able to express myself in one's work and having good relationships. For many Americans, finding these things in Montreal may be more challenging than say a place like Toronto.
On the other hand, Montreal is a way more interesting place to vacation than Toronto.
There are a few people lucky enough to 'make the deal' that you have.
Also, there are very few 'great companies' in Canada to work for, that can leverage high end talent - Canada is 1/10th the size of the US and spends less than 1/2 on R&D per capita. This is because Canada doesn't generally have the kinds of companies that are R&D intensive. Unfortunately.
I think most Toronto devs would happily move to California for a huge pay increase and a chance to work for a 'great company' whereas I feel few wold do the reverse.
I'm really wary of reading NPR articles like this because I feel they are basically playing the facts into a narrative of their political viewpoint.
I acknowledge I'm not in a position many will find themselves in. The shortage of senior engineering positions that pay accordingly is real. There's much more selection of jobs in SF than TO.
Vancouver office had 2200 people, similar situation.
That's nothin to shake a stick at, but by NYC, DC, Seattle, LA, SF, etc. rates it is middling.
Meanwhile, SDE2 at Amazon or others is like $200K USD, at least according to HN a year ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439144
Seattle is expensive as hell these days, but Vancouver still blows it out of the water, and Toronto isn't cheap either; an improvement over SV or Manhattan, for sure, but not like Raleigh-Durham or rural Arkansas.
But we don't.
The marginal increase in my pay is not enough for me to want to move to the USA. The anti-immigrant rhetoric and the laws that follow that rhetoric make it not a place I, or many others, aspire to move to. We're happier to make less money, but feel more secure and safe (in many ways).
And while the current state of play in the US is rather odious, the idea that you'd be less secure or safe in somewhere like NYC or SF is laughable. The only places I've even been accosted on the street were in Melbourne, Australia and Brampton, Ontario. The rhetoric and laws you dread are mostly, or entirely, perception; make no mistake they're a thing, but heavily magnified by a media machine based on getting eyeballs and reactions. Like, the Prairie Provinces are solidly conservative -- AB even took a crack at banning gay marriage a little while back -- and ON managed to vote in yet another Ford.
I'm happy to sit out the Trump years north of the border, but if an offer with another $100K on top of what I'm making now floated my way but required me to be in California, or NYC, or DC, I'd be hard pressed to ignore it.
Possibly more. Again, I'm okay with that.
> the idea that you'd be less secure or safe in somewhere like NYC or SF is laughable
Secure has many meanings beyond the fear of criminals. Who wants to start a family knowing that the government may change its rules and kick you out of the country next year? Who wants to start a business knowing that their country just got put "on a list". And worst of all, who wants to hire someone from another country, knowing that they might be deported if they don't win a lottery in the next 3 years?
> if an offer with another $100K on top of what I'm making now floated my way but required me to be in California, or NYC, or DC, I'd be hard pressed to ignore it.
Right, that's your marginal cost to deal with that stuff. Everyone has one. I have one. But as the life for immigrants in the US gets made more difficult, the average marginal cost to deal with that nonsense goes up- and I get more coworkers here in Toronto.
And I'll tell you right now: go looking, you'll find such an offer if you want it.
NYC and LA have Toronto beat in terms of culture, but NYC living is not that fun, and LA is pretty expensive too.
I would say Toronto is a local optimum.
In Toronto if you’re an experienced sr engineer you can get this in the tech scene. It’s a much smaller employment pool, it it’s there. And there is a lot of r&d happening within that scene. That’s nothing to say of remotely working for an SV company.
The tech scene has exploded here over the past 2-3 years.
I used to make ~100k/yr CAD (75k/yr USD) when I was in TO around 6 years ago. I bought a house around 7 years ago for 550k. I did a remote stint for a Boulder company for a couple years (~120k/yr USD working from TO), then moved to SF (~200k/yr USD + ~100k/yr equity).
I'm a bit out of the loop w/ TO salaries nowadays, but your 170k CAD definitely seems to be on the very high end of the spectrum.
A few thoughts:
The biggest difference in pay comes from equity. ~100k/yr is pretty normal in SF big tech companies, whereas equity comp in TO is pretty much unheard of unless you're a partner in a company. Caveat: not all SF companies offer liquid equity, or even equity that is worth anything.
Taxes are higher for me working in SF (largely because salaries of comparable positions are higher in SF)
Living costs depend a lot on whether you have a spouse and/or kids. A bunkbed in SF goes for 1.6k/mo if you're single trying to save up. In TO, you can rent a cheap room for $600/mo. But for families: 2 bed condo is ~48k/yr USD, vs ~24k/yr in similar distance in TO. Another very important point: in SF, a foreigner spouse's ability to work can be extremely tricky (e.g. spouse in non-tech field would often not be able be get a work visa sponsorship at all). Canadians can get a TN visa relatively easily, but the H1B visa required for other foreigners isn't guaranteed. Green card timelines range from 2.5 years to virtually impossible to get. By comparison, getting a work visa in Canada is pretty straightforward, and the path to permanent residence is also relatively easy, regardless of country of origin.
Preschool costs ~28k/yr USD per kid in SF, vs ~18k/yr CAD (13k/yr USD)
Healthcare in SF costs me ~3.6k USD/yr base (plus copays/other fees depending on how frequently I actually use it) vs free in TO. Dental and vision costs are similar between SF and TO.
Goods generally cost less in SF. Milk costs ~$5/gallon USD in SF vs $10/4L CAD ($7 USD) in TO.
IMHO: SF is better for saving up while young, Toronto gets pretty attractive once you have a piggy bank to afford housing/build a family.
But hey, everyone loves to knock expensive SF housing.
28k/yr for preschool in SF is on the high end. That is not the median.
Please re-do all your prices with the median, not your handpicked most expensive version.
In SF? If you mean in like Oakland, yes I believe I've seen some listings a couple years ago, though I wasn't sure they were real (sites seemed shady). I don't recall finding anything in SF proper for 1.6k, let alone 1k (anywhere), but to be fair I wasn't looking too far out from downtown at the time and since I was coming from out of the country, I was restricting my searches to reputable sources and I had no word-of-mouth network. For what it's worth, I used to rent my basement in Toronto for $300 and you can go even cheaper w/ student houses. So even if you can actually find "cheap" housing in the Bay Area, I can tell you that you can get even cheaper stuff from GTA's chinese community.
The 28k/13k figure is from Bright Horizons (they have locations both in SF and TO so it's perfect for apples-to-apples comparison, and it's what I'm familiar w/). You can get definitely cheaper childcare in both cities (with the caveat that in SF you're going to struggle with wait lists, whereas you typically don't in TO). IIRC, the cheapest in SF is if you qualify for public childcare (1.7k/mo I think it was?), which is still more expensive than Bright Horizons in Toronto.
[1] https://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2014/11/07/17526/san-fr...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=average+daycare+cost+san+fra...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=average+daycare+cost+toronto...
Something happened in the last 2 years in particular that has caused salaries to skyrocket (trump policies taking effect?).
If you have a family, the public schools are generally better in Toronto as well.
I don't have experience w/ the public school system in Toronto yet, but I can say preschool definitely seemed to be one notch higher in TO than SF. In TO, my kids' school tuition included meals and they did STEM activities. In SF, you need to provide lunch, and curriculum-wise, it feels more like a glorified daycare w/ arts&crafts projects.
I regularly pick up a 4 L bag of 1% for about CAD 4.25 (USD 3.00). Where the heck are you doing your grocery shopping, the food hall at Holt Renfrew?
Can we just stop comparing cities? Everyone loves to complain about the cost of living in SF and always brags about how they could buy a mansion in the midwest.
No one cares. It's all about location. There is a reason why California is the most populous state in the union despite it being so expensive (weather and jobs). There is a reason the population in the midwest is so low (lack of jobs and weather mostly).
Right this moment, they are almost the same (46F in SF vs 37F in Toronto). Toronto winter usually goes between 5F and 40F, but summer is way warmer than SF (between 75F to 90F vs 60F to 70F in SF)
I moved to Calgary and the weather is great, nice and dry and Chinooks to warm you up during the winter.
I live in a northern snow state and, other than the relative lack of seasons, SF city weather seems pretty nice to me and not even obviously worse than the South Bay.
These days it’s been hard to peg a good day to go skating because it will suddenly warm up and render all the ice sluggish. It’s really disappointing.
In short: a lot of us like our weather for the variations in it...
In Toronto it is roughly comparable to Chicago or NYC. Vancouver would be similar to Seattle.
Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, etc, would be much colder.
IF you can find a 3bd condo it will cost you WAY more than 900CAD.
Those are just the top two–there are many other reasons to move to Canada than just money.
That someone might have been a Californian. To pick a recent example: https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Videos-show-fatal-shoot...
Hyperbole aside, you are more likely to die from firearms in California than Canada. Most of that, on both sides of the border, is suicide.
Contrary to popular Canadian fear mongering, the US is not a shooting free-for-all, as big as a problem gun violence might be. Of all the variables, getting shot is not something I consider about when deciding between the US and Canada.
Far harder to own a home in Toronto on a tech salary.
And if you get a tech job in SF, you’ve got great health insurance, so not a major obstacle.
Yup, as long as you have a job with medical coverage, you're OK. But God forbid you should lose your job and get sick, right? Because then you're screwed.
At least we're not Kentucky.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fully-ar...
You mean, “the United States”, not Canada, right? The US pays more (not just per capita, but as a share of GDP, and thus would need higher taxes to pay for it) out of public funds for healthcare than Canada does. See, e.g., https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
The US, unlike Canada, also pays a bit more in private funds on healthcare than it does in private funds.
Detroit? Kansas City? Camden? Sure.
But cities like SF aren’t like those cities at all. Quick google shows 33 homocides in SF and 142 in Toronto. Based on population, that’s 33 per million for SF and 24 for Toronto.
There's a fair share of Anglo QCs that will keep speaking English and everything will still work (be workable) in English.
It's not hard to learn French to a day to day level though.
Does not apply to startups, it only applies if you have +50 employees https://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/francisation/entreprises/entrepr...
https://www.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/54yi1o/independen...
Now Quebec City is entirely different. I could see language being more challenging there.
Honestly, Montreal is a hidden gem. Low cost housing, ton of culture and history.
The only drawbacks can be the Québécois anti-immigrant and anti-business climate, but it’s not stifling, just more noticeable than the rest of Canada.
You just need to take a stroll in "Plateau" to witness this. The salaries are also really low and we are the highest taxed province in Canada.
I think we should give folks an accurate portrayal of this city instead of an endless stream self promotion
I think the stat was for the island of Montreal, not the wider city.
That said, I have visited a few times and not speaking French didn’t seem a huge barrier, but I was a tourist.
Would you be able to provide a source for that?
Even during it's Anglo heydays (pre-referenda), I don't think it was that high.
It is true that Montreal is highly Anglophone in the tech sector, but outside of enclaves like downtown, the west Island and a few neighborhoods like TMR and Ville St Laurent, Montreal is not very Anglophone at all.
Bonus: Schwartz’s deli.
White French > White Anglo > Rest
I was speaking more to the high skilled foreign workers in Québec who have to wait years for a permanent residency because they work & reside in Québec. This delay also applies to foreign students in Québec who wants to apply for permanent residency after their studies. Québec is not a good choice for foreign workers and students in Québec who wants a permanent residency. Rest of Canada follows Express Entry but those who work or reside in Québec is not eligible for the fast track process. One country two rules.
For people looking to migrate from a developing country to a developed one, the situation is quite different.
Most importantly, you cannot do anything besides your job on an H1B. No start ups, no side projects. You can't even BE in the US without a job and just bum around for a year. Every interaction with the US border folks makes me feel like a criminal. The visa fundamentally restricts the shape of your life in a way thats hard for residents to really understand.
I already get paid enough to retire comfortably when I'm older and it's no fun retiring young! Retirement costs in Canada are also significantly lower if you can count on free healthcare. Not worth it. I do miss the weather though :)
This whole thing is just super depressing. I feel like I've worked all my life for a great career in the US and it's for nothing if I have to leave everything behind at some point.
I am a foreign person from ROW (Rest of the World) in the US studying with F1 visa and trying to immigrate here via employment based options.
I have friends who also immigrated to Germany and Britain. The process is definitely easier and guaranteed there but for us ROW, the process does not look so bad to me right now. Maybe I just don't know how it should be.
After I graduate with F1, I can work up to 3 years with my OPT, companies apply to H1-B in that period. Some start the H1-B process even before you graduate if you have a bachelor's degree already. You have 4 chances in H1-B in the end.
EB-2 green card is also an option for us, as far as I know I can get that in less than 2 years. I've read about people who applied to EB-2 directly without H1-B and got that in their STEM OPT extension duration.
Finally, even though it is a slim chance, there is also diversity visa lottery. I have friends who got picked from DV lottery while studying here with F1. Everything became easier for them.
The US is still attractive to people like me, I don't think how this article portrays the immigration is true.
"Due to US external policy and cost of life I can't see it being financially practical to move. Although, I would gladly consider any remote position."
I think the immigration complexity is the lesser problem there. My research based on housing, school, transport and food tells me it looks like absurdly expensive. To be able to even consider to move there I would need a salary bump of 3x-5x. No way this will ever happen.
My colleges take their SV salaries and retreat to somewhere else when they want a family.
I think Canada is a better place to raise a family. Or, many other countries are probably comparable (or better).
You'd be surprised. Granted it was over a period of 4 years, but I did hit that 5x.
* Sunnyvale, CA
* Bentonville, AR
* Bangalore, India
Of course they get to poke fun at how they cross two timezones and go back 3 decades culturally in time when they fly out to visit. ;-)
The Bangalore folk poke fun at the US based ones at how cold/wet/expensive/boring we all are. It's all in good fun but it really does hammer in how home is where you currently are.
Edit - I
The whole thing here is stock, which takes a couple years to really stack up, but once it does, you’re making a lot of money.
- A grant of a specific number of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
- Vesting over 4 years
- You get nothing for 12 months
- On the 12th month you get 25%. You can sell this immediately for cash if you choose
One of the following:
A. Each month you vest 1/36th of the remaining stock
B. Each quarter you vest 1/12th of the remaining stock You can sell this immediately for cash if you choose
Some terrible companies like Amazon have abusive vesting schedules such as 5% the first year, 15% the second year, then 40% the final two years.
And from H-1B to greencard, you again need company sponsorship.
Canada looks good now because with Express Entry, you can become a PR relatively fast and from there within 5 years, you get citizenship. From there, getting work in the US as a tech worker can be much easier through a TN visa.
Even getting H1-B is challenging, especially as someone freshly graduated ("entry level positions do not qualify as skilled labour" is what the USCIS told me).
You can fill the blank with essentially any non-US location and it would remain correct. Nowhere in the world pays tech workers as much as US does, in absolute or relative terms. Most of the world, Canada included, has priced developer salaries close to engineer salaries. The US is the sole exception where developer salaries are priced close to doctor salaries. Let's not pretend Canada is the outlier—US is.
I am not saying US is wrong and the rest of the world is right or vice versa in figuring out the correct price for tech work. I am just saying that there are two schools of thought, one the US, the other the rest of the world, and I am sure both have good reasons for their approach.
Anywhere in the world, with the exception of the US, this is the case. US the outlier. Whether it proves the be the outlier that reverts to mean or one that the mean reverts to remains to be seen. I personally think it would be the former. But I don't have strong opinions on it one way or another.
No they don't.
> Canadian doctors still make dramatically less than U.S. counterparts: study
> Despite recent fee hikes, Canadian doctors still lag dramatically far behind their American counterparts in income, according to a new study that also underscores the wide pay gap in both countries between front-line “primary-care” physicians and much-wealthier surgical specialists.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-doctors-still-...
> Anywhere in the world, with the exception of the US, this is the case. US the outlier. Whether it proves the be the outlier that reverts to mean or one that the mean reverts to remains to be seen.
The US has been the richest country in the world in terms of average individual consumption (not income, some small countries like Norway have higher incomes) since independence and before. It's been at the technological frontier since the 1940's at the latest, and very close to it its entire existence. There may be mean reversion in the long run but given the greater share of young people, the best higher education system in the world and a relatively open immigration system there's little reason to believe it'll change anytime soon.
You’re wrong. After the civil war it’s arguable and it’s certainly true after 1900, but American policies favoring agriculture (thanks to romantic notions from Jefferson among others) retarded widespread industrialization in the US until much later than the UK, France, and Germany.
This is again incorrect. Canada has a significant issue with brain drain in medicine as grads, like their CS counterparts, head south for better salaries and a better quality of life.
They are both working on the same products, but outside the USA the pay is a lot worse.
This is incorrect. Good software developers in Poland, and to some extent the Ukraine, are enjoying salaries comparable with doctors there, if not more.
Like in Norway, it seemed like SEs made 1.5-2x what a retail worker would make. Makes for a happier society maybe, but I do want to live a fairly lavish life if possible, and Australia definitely allows for that!
Actually, in the U.S. it is common for a FANG worker's salary to surpass that of doctors'.
Googlers might get 200k but doctors routinely break 400k. Doctors are quite ahead even when you factor in 100k in RSU (which not everybody gets and past stock performance is not an indicator of future performance).
Noting it's H1B data so 10-20% below local salaries. Plus doctors can work anywhere in the country, not just in the city where there is google and facebook.
Google https://h1bdata.info/index.php?year=2019&em=GOOGLE+LLC
Versus some iowa and maine healthcare company https://h1bdata.info/index.php?year=2019&em=EASTERN+MAINE+ME... https://h1bdata.info/index.php?year=2019&em=IOWA+PHYSICIANS+...
If you can land a FAANG job, your total comp (after education costs) will outstrip all but the highest paid physicians.
Real estate is expensive to buy and salaries are low, though, that's for sure.
what's the cost of healthcare, childcare, and transportation like in Canada? I know this discussion personally because I've seen it play out between European and American tech jobs and I've seen a lot of difference in cost for raising children.
In Germany or the Netherlands good public education, kindergardens and so on set you back a few hundred bucks a month, I've seen Americans pay tens of thousands per year. Same for two cars that you don't need if you're an urban resident near a tech hub.
However, I think given the right opportunity I would still head back to the U.S. Things are fucked in the U.S. but the sense of scale, velocity is unmatched. In Toronto you feel that people's attitude is just not the same. There is no hunger or lust to be number #1 and I have always been competitive personality type. In NYC even traditional enterprise corporations (where I worked) there is an intensity and drive that's missing here. Call it the american spirit.
Salary as this stage is relatively unimportant, making 150 or 250k is about the about the same to me. But the scale and types of opportunities is something else. There are roles and jobs that only exist in the U.S.
That being said, for me going back is just a tour of duty, once you are past the journeyman stage of your life and wanting to start a family, then Canada wins unquestioned. The environment, benefits, healthcare, and most importantly education for your children will outweigh just about any salary you can command state-side. Because now you are talking about intangible things that are harder and harder to buy with money.
My opinion is, stay in the U.S. when you are young and/or talented. Then, if you are of Indian or Chinese birth, move elsewhere to start a family and take a senior position in Canada. Typically if you come from reputable shop state-side and demonstrate your worth, you can find a job where people will treat you with respect for that experience. They might not be able to compensate you the same way but you can usually get bumped up a notch.
If you are of white or European heritage and you are in a good place then you can consider staying the U.S. if you can make it work.
Also, if your hypothesis were true, you probably wouldn't see an influx of big companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Intel, Uber, etc.) opening shop in Canada - the companies are obviously moving to the people in this case. Seems fairly obvious to me (as an Australian looking at options for permanent residence in the US) that the US has sabotaged its brain draining ability in the last few years.
Why? Because it's very easy to do so and rent/property prices in Vancouver/Toronto have skyrocketed but tech salaries are nothing compared to what you can make in US in USD. Also taxes, cost of living, etc. in select states in US (texas for example) are much lower. Even in seattle, etc. you pay higher rent, but your salary more than makes up for it.
Canadian policy basically makes sure that we lose the brightest to US .
It’s really not, though - the point is to only allow people who literally can’t be found anywhere else to migrate. They’re looking for one in a million, not just anybody with a decent education who’s interested in living here. The immigration policy was broken for decades and is just now being fixed. We should expect to see lower, but better, immigration.
And whenever I'm making more than I'm spending, I'd happily multiply both numbers.
I’d say expenses are 50% higher (Toronto to SF, mostly housing), but income is 100-200% higher.
I hope these changes drive up tech salaries in Canada -- I fear they won't. Currently they're about 20-40% less than the US particularly due to the currency difference. Cost of living is also a bit higher, and absolutely insane in Vancouver (and a lesser degree, Toronto).
I suspect it will continue the H-1B trend, in that it companies won't pay better wages, just outsource to cheaper Canadian labor, who are in turn taxed higher and squeezed harder.
And along the way they will drive up housing prices, and drive up general revenue and consumer spending since there are simply more bodies in the economy.
The system benefits the owners of capital and the migrants themselves, but not existing ('legacy') Canadians.
Along the way you get all kinds of social problems caused by the excess of males and the preponderance of Asian families to selectively abort female fetuses.
It also depends on where the immigrants come from. Chinese and Indians have the longest wait list, and therefore its natural for them to look for better options. They are right to do so, imo.
There's also the weather and cost, the large cities in Canada can be insanely expensive, with terrible weather, and salaries aren't anywhere near US levels. If your rent is 2-3k and you're making 100k CAD a year, it doesn't feel like you're living the dream. Want to buy a home in Vancouver or Toronto? No big deal, just fork over 1-2 million CAD for a 1 hour one way commute.
The quality of immigrants is a factor too. The US still sweeps up the best and brightest of academia and business.
I know more than a few Canadians (from immigrant backgrounds) that moved to SV recently purely for the weather and salary reasons. I wonder if when they get their citizenship, many of those in the article will be back in the US or moving there.
(And no, I don't have a criminal record, or indeed any hint of what I might have "done wrong")
See charts here: https://medium.com/@petilon404/us-prosperity-is-dependent-on...
(Source: https://simpletax.ca/calculator)
Utter bullshit. Source: the many friends and family members who have been treated by the system.
You're immediately forgetting State taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and such. That 34% quickly becomes 44 to 50% depending on where you live.
The average tax rate for a single person making 250K in Ontario is 39.80% [2]
But with the extra taxes you also get some better benefits like healthcare, cheaper education. Of course if your main goal is to save as much money as you can, then it probably better in the US because you earn more salary and USD converts better into other currencies.
[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#I4RNWQ9WYm [2] https://simpletax.ca/calculator
Here's a detailed example (grep for "Average tax rate"): https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
I don't think I get it.
Anyway, I'm not so sure that's relevant. If Amazon or Microsoft pay less for the same role and skill level in their Vancouver office than their Seattle office, why wouldn't a Canadian company do the same? I don't think the pay differential is due to patriotism by upper management, so I'm not sure it has to do with where the company was founded.
In some cases proximity to the head office may be seen as worth extra pay, but that isn't always the case either.
The reasoning seems to be "we pay less in Canada because we can", and Canadian companies like Shopify or (in the past) RIM play the same way.
The Bay Area isn't even close to full, it's just NIMBYs who hate any change blocking things.
I meant politically, the Bimbys don’t want more people in the bay area that’s why so many anti growth politicians get elected
I was looking to move from the UK.
US salaries were the highest, but it was too difficult to get in.
So I started looking in Canada and found a job in New Brunswick.
I like it here, but part of me still wishes I could have gotten into Texas instead.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/interactives/internationa...
Over 44 million residents of the US were not born in the US, as opposed to 8 million in Canada. As a percentage of the population, that's lower than Canada, but by weight of sheer numbers, the US shouldn't have any problem with this.
The US takes over 1.2 million immigrants into the country every year, we just don't have much of a skilled immigration system - ours is largely based on family reunification. Canada and Australia, on the other hand, have a points based system that favors immigrants with education and skills.
I actually do blame the high tech industry for some of this. I just don't think it's a "bug" that the US system was largely based on a very indentured approach, where high tech companies got to decide who is allowed into the US and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain, with long, grueling waits for a green card, where a would-be immigrant was beholden to an employer (called a "sponsor") and could be fired and deported at the employer's pleasure.
Facebook, Google, Apple, all the big companies - you see, what they wanted was a freer, more open system where skilled immigrants got to choose what they'd study, where they'd work, what companies they'd work for, and even whether they'd work in tech in the first place, in accordance with their own personal values and interests and market signals such as salary, cost of living, and work conditions.
That's what google and Facebook wanted. Unfortunately, all they could get was an visa that they bestow and control, putting them in a position to determine micro aspects of a would-be immigrants life.
Right. This utterly corporate self serving H1B guest worker visa system that undermines markets and is an affront to freedom did terrible damage to the public perception of skilled immigration.
Want to be clear, I don't blame anyone for working on an H1B, this wasn't your choice, and it was your only option. Don't blame you for going to Canada, either. But I just don't buy it from the corporate lobbyists. This was hardly a bug, to the companies that make heavy use of the H1B, the control over the worker's right to live int the US is a feature, and they lobbied hard for it.
It seems pretty hard to argue that the US's current immigration policies aren't helping out Canada right now.
It takes at least 5 years to get Canadian citizenship. 5 years is a long time to build a life somewhere that people wouldn't want to migrate to the US. You are assuming it's just more money that motivates everyone.
Whatever the ultimate corporate goals may be, this topic is clearly a control issue, not a talent one.
In software, talent can do what it wants wherever it feels like doing it--businesses will yield to it.
Now that the US has shot itself on its foot and others are waking up, the playing field appears to be getting more balanced once again.
Because as a software engineer with a lot of software engineer friends, none of us have seen that.
If you are not seeing growth you may need to gain more marketable skills. Whenever hiring people, more in demand skill sets definitely command a higher salary
But what you linked does not clearly indicate that at all considering growth has been consistent over the past 8 years. In fact it seems that salary outlook has even slowed slightly over the past four years.
This does not match your claim at all.
Also, the gains have literally come because of the investment in smart immigrants in the 00s. That gave fluidity in the hiring market, allowing megacorps to expand rapidly while other countries couldn't. They just didnt have so many smart employees.
The impact of today's immigration policies will be felt 5 years from now
One: These companies want to pay less for more. Smart developers are not going to go for that, so they'll look elsewhere. Then the companies can say "Oh, we can't find anyone, boo-hoo, let's hire someone cheaper now. From overseas."
Two: See one.
IF you don't believe me, just do a job search and see all the shit software jobs out there. 12 bucks an hour for a full stack? 75k a year for 5 years experience in five languages? Oh, and you gotta be DevOps too.
These companies are just trying to take advantage of a system.