Canada could be on the verge of having more highly skilled workers come here after U.S. President Donald Trump added a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applications.
This most recent move is aimed at making it harder for businesses to bring in top-skilled candidates from outside the U.S. by increasing the fee on new H-1B visa applications to US$100,000.
Previously, the fee ranged from $2,000 to $5,000 for companies looking to bring highly skilled foreign workers, often in the technology sector, to that country.
Industry and legal experts say some of Canada’s immigration and visa systems could be made easier for the mostly highly skilled workers, including in the tech sector, to move to Canada and boost the economy — or they may go elsewhere.
If businesses or individuals aren’t willing to pay the additional fees to bring some skilled foreign workers to the U.S., then those candidates may seek opportunities elsewhere.
“I think the fee is going to dampen some of the demand and create opportunities for some of those workers to look to Canada,” says Bill Macgregor, a citizenship and immigration lawyer and partner at Gowling WLG.
“For Canadian employers to be able to look at that population — I think the answer is yes, some people are going to do that. So it’s a benefit to the Canadian labour market.”
The H-1B visa program was created in 1990 for applicants with at least a bachelor’s degree or higher to work in the United States, and can serve as a way for some holders to transition to permanent residency.
Technology companies based in the U.S., including Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Amazon and Apple have been using the H-1B visa program for years as a way to fill vacancies with the best candidates available globally — and not just in the U.S.
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“It is highly attractive to the people who receive it because it’s also a path towards permanent residency, which isn’t true of all visas or work permits, and it has been a primary mechanism for a long time to enable the tech industry,” says Daniel Wigdor, a professor at the University of Toronto and CEO of the artificial intelligence venture studio AXL.
“The number of them is limited each year and there’s sort of a race to get the H-1B in the first few months of the year every time. They (tech companies) have been pushing on Congress to try to expand the program — obviously, this is basically the opposite of that.“
When it comes to highly skilled workers, Canada offers several options for work permits, including the Global Talent Stream, which is a part of the current temporary foreign worker program.
Legal experts say the Global Talent Stream is very similar to the H-1B visa in the U.S., and in some ways, it may actually work better by comparison.
That might make it easier for Canadian firms to attract top-skilled talent from abroad who want to come to North America, but might now face more difficulties getting hired at a U.S. firm due to the $100,000 cost of a visa for them.
“Unlike the H-1B system in the U.S., there’s no quota. And so it’s relatively fast, which is great for employers who need to try and address their skills shortages,” MacGregor says.
However, he says there are still several key gaps between the types of visas offered for highly skilled foreign workers in Canada versus the U.S. that could make recruitment challenging.
“Americans have additional visa programs that are more categorical, including the O-1 visa, which is meant to be for those with extraordinary ability, and a short-term internship visa called the J-1. Canada sort of lumps a whole bunch of this stuff together in that temporary foreign worker category,” Wigdor says.
“We’ve seen real problems where very highly skilled people aren’t able to do work here. My PhD students at the University of Toronto that are international students, they can go to the U.S. to do summer internships, but they can’t do summer internships in Canada because there is no equivalent to the J-1 program here.”
Wigdor says many of those highly skilled workers have the potential to do things like create and grow companies that could spur job growth at a time when the labour market is being weakened by the impacts of tariffs and the trade war.
“We’ve been making it too hard, unfortunately, and so I’ve been seeing incredibly strong candidates, their permanent residence applications are getting held up for years and years,” Wigdor says.
“These are people with PhDs who have founded companies, and are exactly the people who can help to move this stuff forward. We absolutely should be doing more to open up and enable all these incredible technology leaders to come here and create great jobs for Canadians.”
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