Why the disparity? Especially with Canada - no language barrier and no time zone differences. Why doesn’t the free market equalize Canadian dev wages with American ones?
And bitching about bureaucratic terms like non-resident alien? All countries have silly bureaucratic language and words can have multiple meanings. Nobody thinks "alien" in this context means you're a little green man from Mars.
No offense but it is spoken like a true American. I have dealt with European immigration and it was pleasant/painless for the most part. In the US they make you feel unwelcome and they drown you in paperwork. Not that Canada is much better these days, but I am a citizen so don't need to deal with it.
100% agree, but we weren't talking about which system is better, we were talking about why Canadians may be reluctant to relocate to the US. It's not like Canadians who come to work in the US give up their citizenship. Worse comes to worst and you lose your job and health care and have a major medical issue, the Canadian safety net is still there for you.
Before 2020, it was fairly uncommon to work remotely and most employees were expected to physically come to the office. You would relocate if you got a job in another state, and employers had to go through a painful visa process to access foreign workers or set up expensive international satellite offices.
The great WFH experiment kicked off by the pandemic concluded that no productivity was lost, so many employers realized that they did not actually need to hire domestically at all. Everyone can be remote and work from wherever. LCOL in the US is still extravagant compared to many other regions, so a top engineer can now be hired for pennies on the dollar. I think there's a very good chance that tech salaries in the US have begun to and will continue to equalize with the rest of the world as a result.
Also it took the risk off the CEO plate that remote might fail. Further the market is rewarding them for it now.