As a datapoint: I immigrated to the US in 2008. After 5 years on an F1 visa and 10 years on an H1B, I'm still at least 10 more years away from being freed from the immigration and visa hassle.
No?
Could it be because you and I both know that FAANG companies' Canadian offices are basically places to stash those who cannot and will not ever get US visas, plus the occasional native Canadian who does not want to move to the US for family reasons?
Second, your supposition of my under/overestimation has nothing to do with the factual composition of FAANG and other US tech companies' Canadian offices. As I said, they are a) mostly people who cannot and will not ever get US visas (i.e., those who didn't make the first hurdle that xbonez was lucky enough to cross), and b) a few native Canadians who for one reason or another don't want to move to the US.
I don't know if you know this, but the rest of the world considers the US to be kind of a terrible place. Sure, it might be better than home, but Canada is way better than both.
Basically, yes. According to the Canadian government <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11287-...> (table 1), for every two Canadian-born people moving to the US, one person born outside the US or Canada moves from Canada to the US. Given that during 2001-2006 20% or less of Canada were immigrants <https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221026/g-a00...>, that implies that a Canadian resident born outside the US or Canada is about 50% more likely to move to the US than a Canadian native.
I've heard that New Zealand is similarly used by those seeking to move to Australia.
The exact same thing happens across the board, as I cite elsewhere <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36512411>: The best Canadian scientists move to the US, while an equal number in absolute terms of (presumably not the top) American scientists move to Canada.
Also, most highly skilled Canadian devs I know just negotiate remote positions with US based companies. That's what I used to do: US salary living in Vancouver
The Chinese Canadian thing does happen. It's usually 1st generation immigrants with very few ties to Canada and highly competitive families. They're parents usually barely speak English, and their entire families are still in China. Canada let a lot of Chinese immigrants come in during the 80s, and did very little to integrate them, and this is the result I guess.
For what reasons?
Having worked with a lot of Canadians over the years, I've discovered that a significant number of them have this very negative perception of the USA that is not accurate. I can see a lot of these reasons being based on incorrect assumptions, especially when considering how educated upper-middle class people live.
I spent a lot of time in Toronto about 7-8 years ago and I couldn't imagine living there as an American. Everything is so expensive (housing in particular), traffic is terrible, the weather sucks, and my role in Canada paid like 25% less. The food was pretty good, but that's about it.
Sounds like you moved to Toronto and tried to live like you were in the US. No wonder you had a bad time.
I presume he's among those I wrote about, the ones stuck in Canada because they cannot and will not ever be able to get a US visa. And/or believes everything he reads in /r/worldnews and /r/politics.
Shouldn't you save Reddit-tier comments like this for /r/worldnews or /r/politics?
Meanwhile, in a survey of scientists from 16 countries <http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>, the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.
>Sure, it might be better than home, but Canada is way better than both.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but historically, every year four Canadians move to the US for every American going the other way. According to the Canadian government, this has not changed in the 21st century <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11287-...>.[1] According to Reddit, Texas is basically one step from Nazi Germany, but Texas is those Canadians' fourth-favorite state <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/t/11287/tbl002...>; if you exclude Florida and its retiree-heavy flow, it is their third.
From the Canadian-government analysis:
* "Canadian-born persons who emigrated to the United States between 2000 and 2006 were relatively young", with a median age of 31. Unsurprisingly, "Nearly two-thirds of recent Canadian emigrants to the United States were employed".
* They are also younger than Canadians in general: "Lastly, Canadians who emigrated recently were also generally very young compared to the Canadian population where the median age according to the 2006 Census was 39.5."
* Canadian migrants have become younger in recent years, implying that retiring is further decreasing as a cause of migration: "While the median age of all Canadians residing in the United States was 49 in 2006, the median age was only 31 for Canadians who emigrated between 2000 and 2006. In addition, many of these recent emigrants were of prime working age: over one-half (approximately 53%) were between 20 and 44 years of age. Only around 10% were aged 60 or older."
* While retirement was an important factor for Canadian migrants to Florida and Arizona, those states only received under a quarter of all Canadian migrants to the US, with correspondingly higher median ages.
According to that above-mentioned survey, if you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat:
*16% of all Canadian scientists move to the US.
* They're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.
By comparison, 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada, so about 1.6-1.7% total. Since the US has nine times more people, that means that in absolute numbers the 1.7% of American scientists is about equal to the 16% of Canadian scientists, but there is no reason to think that the 1.7% makes up the top tier of American scientists; why would the best move north of the border? In other words, the US is receiving the best of Canadian scientists in exchange for an equal number of its non-best.
[1] It is true that from 2010 to 2012—during which the Canadian economy genuinely performed better than the US's—70,000 Americans moved north while only 20,000 Canadians moved south <http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/americans-mov...>, but this still puts the per-capita ratio considerably in the US's favor.
Anyway, I'm not denying any of those things. That still doesn't mean people think the US is a good place to live. They think they can make more money there, and the tradeoff is worth it.
But there's also plenty of people for whom that tradeoff is not worth it. Those people don't use Canada as a stepping stone, they just like living there. Because the US is kind of a shithole.
I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half. Yes, Canada has its issues, but I'm overall happier living here than I was in the Bay. We have a regional train system that runs every 3-6 minutes instead of the 15-20 you get from BART and better accessibility to the outdoors (I can get to a ski mountain on the bus). I had better accessibility to healthcare in California, but here I don't have to worry about being out thousands of dollars for healthcare if I get laid off.
I work for a smaller tech company founded and headquartered in Vancouver, but I've seen the big tech companies making huge investments in this city over the last couple years. Amazon is in the final stages of building a new tower that will house 6000 employees [0] and Microsoft recently moved into 75,000 sqft of office space and is working on another 400,000 sqft [1]. The tech industry in this city is booming and it's certainly not all driven by companies stashing employees who can't get US visas.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/amazon-canad... [1] https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/microsoft-vancouver-office-b...
125k CAD is 94k USD. Going from 135k to 94k USD is not trivial, and Vancouver is pretty expensive as well. Skytrain is pretty awesome though.
As an American STEM worker in Canada: salaries are definitely higher in the US. Not even close in some cases, easily a 40% difference for high-end roles. And while COL is high in SF or NYC, it's just as crazy in Greater Toronto or Vancouver but the salaries have not kept up.
Make no mistake, you can still do pretty well, but I could probably double my salary if I moved back to the big US East Coast city that I'm from.
Long-term I'm not optimistic about the US economy and culture, and my wife wouldn't be a fan, so I'm willing to miss out -- but sometimes it stings knowing what options are out there.
Yeah I made the sacrifice and lived in the Bay, crammed into a hacker house for a few years.
It totally sucks, but working with all those smart people and stashing the money completely changed my life.
Definitely a sacrifice I’d make again
However, I don't know if I agree with you about SF and NYC being equivalent to Toronto and Vancouver. They're just not. We complain about rent in Canada, but SF/NYC rent is another level of bullshit. And general expenses are definitely more expensive as well, I know I feel it whenever I travel to the US.
The other thing is that in most US cities you have to pay for a car. That's just not true in Canada. This makes up a huge part of the income gap.