To fill the 50,000 jobs at an eventual 8.1-million square foot headquarters, Amazon needs a city that can provide home-grown talent, as well as appeal to a class of global programming mavens who can choose where to live.
For technology companies preoccupied with luring the best and brightest from around the world, the Trump administration's America First economic strategy is more than a little troubling. At the core of the worries is a
White House crackdown on the H-1B visa program — the doorway into the U.S. for thousands of software engineers and other highly skilled foreign workers.
Called the "genius visa" and America's secret economic weapon, H-1B is credited with supplying the programming horsepower that built Silicon Valley into what it is today. At Facebook, for instance, foreign guest workers make up 15 per cent of the staff.
Antipathy towards that visa from the Trump administration, combined with its attempted Muslim ban and a potential Mexico border wall, is unsettling not only for the tech industry, but also for international workers who may now be second-guessing the wisdom of relocating to a country that's no longer as welcoming.
Enter Canada, which has no such baggage. Indeed, the equivalent visa program here
is actually being fast-tracked in the hopes of poaching the exact workers who not long ago would have automatically landed in Silicon Valley.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Adelaide
