Canadian tech firms will have their pick of overseas talent thanks to Trump's anti-immigrant policies

The massive talent shortage in tech has all kinds of weird effects: the inability to outbid tech giants means that badly secured hospitals get devoured by ransomware; it means that companies that value diversity get to outmaneuver much better-resourced competitors; it means that companies that pledge to be ethical can edge out their competition (and that unethical conduct can have real costs); and it means that companies get so desperate that they form industry-wide criminal conspiracies to try to short circuit the seller's market for tech skills.

The tech industry can't afford to be picky about national origins. Apple was co-founded by a Syrian refugee; Google was co-founded by a Russian emigre -- indeed, more than half of the founders of billion-dollar US startups are immigrants.

For Canada -- with its cheap dollars and much smaller market -- this is a serious disadvantage, one that was magnified by more than a decade of politics dominated by oil extraction, not knowledge-economy or manufacturing businesses. The oil industry doesn't need a lot of big brains: at its root, oil is a bunch of holes in the ground, surrounded by guns.

But America's just shot itself in the foot by electing a man who has promised to end H-1B immigration, and to end immigration from the world's most unstable, war-torn regions -- the regions from which anyone with in-demand skills will be fleeing first. Canada's new, more migrant-friendly government offers the talent that America will not accept a pretty good second prize: a neighbouring, wealthy, stable state with good access to US markets, whose government will not "extreme vet" you and make you feel like you and your family could be deported at any second, on any pretense, just to throw some red meat to the xenophobic base.

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