[LINK] "Vancouver, the New Tech Hub"

[rfmcdonald]

Borders can be an advantage for border cities. Vancouver, it seems, benefits from the influx of American tech companies seeking to hire foreign workers who can't get into the United States because of American visa requirements, at least as reported by Karen Weise in Bloomberg Businessweek. Commenters suggest that Canadian citizens and residents might be missing out on employment opportunities, however.

In the heart of downtown Vancouver, construction workers are installing glass facades on two office towers. One will be an engineering hub for Microsoft (MSFT), the other for Amazon.com (AMZN). Facebook (FB), Salesforce.com (CRM), and a bunch of startups with less familiar names have also been setting up shop in the city. In addition to great views in a convenient time zone, Vancouver offers U.S. tech companies world-class talent, lower salaries, and few immigration headaches.

Each year the U.S. government grants as many as 85,000 H-1B visas for highly skilled workers. In the last two years, it received so many applications that it stopped taking them after five days and held a lottery. Companies applied for about 172,500 visas in April, meaning at least 87,500 engineers, developers, and others couldn’t take jobs in the U.S. Canada welcomes any highly skilled worker who has a job offer, and salaries for tech workers are about 10 percent to 15 percent lower than in the U.S., according to Jen Geddes, a steering committee member of HR Tech Group, a networking group in British Columbia.

Karen Jones, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, says her company applied for about twice the roughly 750 H-1B visas it received for 2015. “The U.S. laws clearly did not meet our needs,” she says. “We have to look to other places.” Microsoft opened a small office in Vancouver in 2007, when U.S. visa applications for the first time quickly surpassed the congressional limit. This month it announced plans to more than double its roughly 300-employee office in Vancouver, where video games have been the focus. There, Microsoft will hire and train 400 software developers from around the world to work on mobile and cloud projects. Jones says Microsoft didn’t choose to expand in Vancouver “purely for immigration purposes, but immigration is a factor.”

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Salesforce moved its Vancouver operation into 17,500 square feet in Gastown, the city’s equivalent of San Francisco’s startup-heavy Mission District. Last year, Twitter (TWTR) interviewed candidates for what it called in job postings a “global centre of excellence.” Facebook opened a temporary Vancouver office last May to train as many as 150 newly hired developers while they wait for U.S. visas. The company has continued to hire recent graduates to work there. Facebook’s Vancouver recruits come from Belgrade, New Delhi, São Paulo, and Shanghai (as well as Canada), according to LinkedIn (LNKD) profiles. The mix of hires varies from company to company.