Canada Recruits High-Skilled Foreigners in US – And Gets 10,000 Applications

The Canadian government is recruiting high-skilled foreigners working in the United States to move to Canada instead – and the program has been so successful that it met its target of 10,000 applicants in just two days.

Canada this week launched a special work permit for foreign workers who already have obtained an H-1B visa in the US, who number nearly 600,000 and come mostly from India and China. The program’s 10,000 quota was filled in the first two days of the week, a spokesman for Canada’s immigration minister, Sean Fraser, said on Wednesday.

“We even had a whole campaign to promote this and we had to put an end to that,” spokesman Jeremy Bellefeuille said.

It is unusual for a country to so explicitly target the visa holders of another country. Bellefeuille said the program was a trial run {snip}

Each year, up to 85,000 people are selected for H-1B visas in the US, a mainstay for technology giants such as Amazon.com Inc, Google parent Alphabet Inc, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc and International Business Machines Corp.

The H-1B visa program allows US companies to employ foreign workers in specialized occupations in sectors like technology, engineering and medicine. Usually, they are issued for three years and renewable. Most of the nearly 600,000 H-1B visa holders in the US are from India and China.

{snip}