Canada Immigration and Citizenship News

The focus of the debate over the need of the IT industry to maintain access to the pool of foreign knowledge workers, as well as of the legislative proposals, has been on the H-1B specialty worker nonimmigrant category. This is scarcely surprising, given the fact that this category has proven overwhelmingly to be the most frequently used avenue through which to obtain employment authorization for such foreign knowledge workers. Although the category is certainly not reserved exclusively for knowledge workers in the IT industry, it is not coincidental that Indian and Chinese citizens, who represent the most important pool of foreign knowledge workers for IT companies in the U.S., also comprise the most numerous constituency of H-1B workers, accounting for more than half of the total admissions permitted annually under this category.

 CANADIAN IT KNOWLEDGE WORKERS

  One development that has gone largely unnoticed in the national dialogue with respect to the IT industry's unsatisfied demand for knowledge workers is the emergence of Canada as an important repository of such knowledge workers. No one should be taken aback by this; Canada's geographical proximity, its cultural affinities to the U.S., the high level of technological education available at its universities, and the fact that it has its own well-developed IT industry make it seem quite natural that U.S. IT companies struggling to meet their hiring needs should view qualified Canadian professionals as particularly attractive resources.

  The southward flow of Canadian IT knowledge workers has increased appreciably in the past few years, but has yet to awaken much interest in this country. This may be explained in part by the fact that their numbers do not yet approach the numbers of Chinese or Indians in the IT sector, and in part by the fact that the presence of Canadians in this country, and the threat they are perceived to pose to the domestic labor force, do not arouse the types of passions excited by the arrival of citizens of other nations.

 ? The Canadian IT Brain Drain

  The lack of attention paid in the U.S. to the entry of Canadian IT knowledge workers into its work force stands in marked contrast to Canada's preoccupation with the subject. For some years now, Canadian scholars, political commentators, and journalists have bemoaned the country's "brain-drain" of technologically literate professionals to the U.S. Although such a brain-drain is not a novel development, it is generally agreed that the passage of the NAFTA has intensified the pace of this flight, and one Canadian scholar has gone as far as declaring that the true Perotian "sucking sound" created by the NAFTA was produced by the movement of jobs, not from the U.S. to Mexico, but from Canada to the U.S.

  There is an element of truth to this rhetorical flight of fancy: a 1996 study by the Canadian Advanced Technology Association found that 75 percent of electrical engineering and computer science students at the University of Waterloo in Ontario intended to look for work in the U.S. after graduation. Analysis of income tax data on tax filers leaving Canada bound for all destinations also revealed that individuals earning more than $150,000 a year were seven times as likely to leave Canada as the average taxpayer. Those who had incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 were five times as likely to move.

  Overall, it has been estimated that Canada suffered a net loss of almost 20,000 professionals to the U.S. between 1982 and 1996, resulting in an estimated lost investment to the Canadian taxpayer of C$6.7 billion. In the IT sector of the Canadian economy, the situation has been exacerbated by the "churning" problem perceived by some labor experts. One such expert has described "churning" as the departure from Canada to the U.S. of IT knowledge workers who are then replaced by Indian programmers from Bangalore. Even if the programmers who arrive during a given period outnumber the Canadian IT knowledge workers who are lost during the same period, factoring in the expense of settling such aliens and their families and the delay before these persons begin to earn and produce as much as the Canadians they replaced results in a significant loss to the country. It has been noted, for instance, that foreign-born professionals who entered Canada after 1967 were typically taking 10 to 15 years to catch up to the level of productivity of their Canadian-born peers. The problem is aggravated further by the cost of the departure to the U.S. of such foreign-born workers, often within a short space of time of having obtained Canadian citizenship and therefore becoming eligible for the benefits of the NAFTA.