Indian IT professionals look to Canada as US tightens rules for H-1B visa
New Delhi: Indian IT professionals, who have historically been the highest recipients of H-1B visas, are now making a beeline to Canada as the Donald Trump administration tightens regulations for the elite visa.
The Canadian government has started a programme in 2017 called Global Skills Strategy, which has set a target to welcome 3,10,000 new permanent residents in 2018 and 3,30,000 in 2019.
The Economic Times citing a report called ‘Building a Nation of Innovators’ by the Canadian government said 40,833 jobs and 3,625 applications have been approved for high-skilled immigrants as of November 2018.
Experts say the Canadian government gives preference to H-1B holders, whose visa extension gets cancelled. Typically, a professional with an H-1B visa would have got an extension for another three years in the US, but tougher guidelines increased scrutiny of these visa holders and new visa applications.
“If someone is moving after working in the US, they are given priority and they get the access faster,” the ET report quoted Vartika Manasvi, founder, Stack-Raft as saying. “In fact, there are many people who are on visa extensions till 2021 and have OPT status (when you do a STEM degree in the US), (but) they still want to move to Canada,” she said, adding nearly one third of the H-1B visa holders moving to Canada are Indians.
Even IT companies are setting offices in Canada amid uncertainty over the H-1B visa extension, said Manasvi. Worth mentioning here is IT companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant and US arms of Tech Mahindra and HCL accounted for nearly two-thirds of the 13,177 rejection of H-1B extensions for the top 30 companies, according to a report.
Canada is also attracting highly-skilled professionals with potential citizenship in three years, whereas Indians in the US have to wait for as much as a decade for a green card. However, salary levels in Canada are lower as compared to the US.
There is an increasing trend of tech talent movement to Canada as the immigration process is much more predictable there, Poorvi Chothani, managing partner at LawQuest told ET.
