Is Canada “stealing talent from Uncle Sam?“

According to a recent Maclean’s article:

Each year, a wave of foreign-born employees in the U.S. exhausts the sixth and final year of work visas known as H-1Bs—documents created for companies who can’t find homegrown talent to fill certain jobs…

It is these workers Ottawa has been targeting, and its efforts appear to be paying off. During the period from 1998 to 2008, the number of skilled workers coming into the country from the United States more than doubled, from 1,969 to 4,085.

Can’t work in the U.S.? Come to Canada, say companies such as Microsoft, which “last year opened a 70,000-sq.-foot ‘development centre‘ in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond to house 300 workers hailing from more than 40 different countries. Many have ‘immigration challenges’ preventing them from working in the U.S…,” Maclean’s explains.

And with the U.S. economy continuing to be in the doldrums, it could be not only a shortage of visas, but also “…a shortage of work in the U.S… driving these U.S. castaways north.”

Read the entire article here.

And check with Citizenship and Immigration Canada for more information about applying for Canadian skilled worker status.

Photo by Beverlykahuna (flickr)