Research: Toronto saw the biggest growth in tech jobs of any North American city over past five years, reflecting Canada's more welcoming stance on immigration
Joel Rose / NPR : Tweets: @npr , @nandinigupta201 , @johnjhorton , @usf_economics , @jay_hernandez , and @nprjoel Tweets: @npr : The tech industry across Canada is booming. And one of the biggest reasons is U.S. immigration policy. The Trump administration has made it harder for high-skilled workers to get visas. Canada, meanwhile, has been making it easier. https://www.npr.org/... Nandini Gupta / @nandinigupta201 : If capital is mobile and labor is not - it will follow labor. Google etc have all opened subsidiaries in Canada because of h1b visa denials in the US. https://twitter.com/... John Horton / @johnjhorton : Congratulations to my Canadian friends, but what an unforced error for the US... https://twitter.com/... @usf_economics : Tech booming in Canada because global talent finds it easier to go there than come here. https://twitter.com/... Jay Hernandez / @jay_hernandez : Let us wallow and writhe in the slippery afterbirth of a Trump presidency. #maga https://twitter.com/... Joel Rose / @nprjoel : Two years ago, we reported that U.S. immigration policy might drive high-skilled workers from around the world to Canada. This month I went to Toronto to find out if we were right. https://www.npr.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs from signal to confirmation. Back in 2017, Toronto startups were already reporting double-digit increases in job applications from the US after Trump's election, and by early 2018 US firms like Amazon and Google were circling Canada's tech sector while Trudeau toured Silicon Valley to counter brain drain.
This research closes the loop: Toronto's tech job growth outpaced every other North American city over five years, a trajectory that later showed up in CBRE ranking Toronto the third-largest tech hub on the continent. The mechanism is policy asymmetry — tightened US high-skilled visas against Canada's easier entry — which is why UK and Canadian firms are still hunting talent amid the ongoing H-1B clampdown years later.
First-order effects
- High-skilled workers denied or deterred by US H-1B processing now have a proven alternative path, and Toronto employers — from startups to Google's Canadian subsidiaries — capture that labor directly.
- US tech firms that opened Canadian operations to house visa-blocked workers gain a growing local talent pool, reducing their dependence on US immigration outcomes for staffing plans.
Second-order effects
- Competing North American hubs like New York and Silicon Valley face relative erosion in talent inflows, pressuring them to lobby for looser US visa policy rather than compete on wages alone.
- Canada's universities and immigration agencies become de facto screening infrastructure for the North American tech labor market, raising the value of Canadian permanent residency as a career asset.
Third-order effects
- If capital follows mobile-labor arbitrage, as Nandini Gupta argues, sustained US restriction risks structurally relocating parts of the tech ecosystem — R&D centers, subsidiary headquarters — across the border, a shift the Foreign Policy argument about lost talent like Huawei's 5G contributor Erdal Arikan warns compounds over decades.
- Immigration policy hardens into a competitive lever between nations for tech industry location, making visa regimes as consequential to hub formation as tax incentives or venture funding.
The trend: Tightened US skilled-immigration policy is steadily redistributing North America's tech talent and corporate footprints toward Canada, with Toronto the clearest beneficiary so far.