The Current - Could the U.S. H1-B visa fee be a win for Canadian tech?

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

The Trump administration is introducing a new $100,000 fee on the specialized visa, forcing companies to pay up for top talent. Our panel of tech experts looks at whether the Canadian tech industry could take advantage of the change and attract skilled workers here instead.

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. It is about to get a whole lot more expensive for U.S. companies to hire skilled non-American workers. The U.S. President, Donald Trump, has imposed a $100,000 fee for what is known as an H-1B visa. These visas are mostly used by Silicon Valley companies to hire specialized tech professionals. Here's the U.S. Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnik. The whole idea is no more. these big tech companies or other big companies train foreign workers. They have to pay the

government $100,000. Then they have to pay the employee. So it's just not economic. If you're going to train somebody, you're going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land. My next guests think that Trump's move is both an opportunity and a risk for the Canadian tech sector. Jackson Conn is the CEO of AAPTCHA, a former policy advisor for industry, science, and economic development, Canada. Benjamin Bergen is the president of the Council of Canadian Innovators, and Martin Bessiri is the CEO and founder of Passage. It's a company that builds AI to help bring international talent to Canada and the United States.

They all join us now. Good morning, everyone. Morning. Good morning, Matt. Jackson, let's start with you. Just, I mean, give us the very brief sketch. What is the H-1Bisa in terms of how important it is to American tech firms? critical to lots of U.S. tech firms. It's one of the most prominent programs in the world.

Historically, it's often been used a lot by consulting companies, but I believe in most recent years, it's been used by the biggest tech companies in the world, in particular, like Microsoft and Amazon. So, I mean, it's a lottery program historically. So that is critical. And if you got one of these, it's a great thing. There's also another visa called the 01, which is also quite popular if you're an individual of extraordinary talent. But again, this is kind of the go-to visa for a lot of high-skilled talent looking to come to the U.S. So it's a big deal, these changes. Well, and talk about that talent very briefly. I mean, we heard Howard Lutnik say, you know, train the workers here. Don't you? We're not bringing in people to do this work.

Who are those workers? And could you train American workers to do the jobs that otherwise are being brought into the United States through that visa? Yeah, I mean, I think the U.S. is trying to tackle a number of economic issues. One is even a number of computer science grads in the U.S. are unemployed. But truthfully, I mean, the U.S. has always been the top place for for many top talent to go, building a lot of these AI companies. in particular right now. And so, you know, to cut that off now at the knees, I mean, I think that could be challenging for their economy. I don't know if it's going to affect the top one, 10% of talent, because, again, these researchers sometimes are getting paid millions, even tens of

millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. That's how valuable this talent is, but it is going to affect a huge, huge group of a lot of people. And so there's going to be a big shift. A big shift. And Benjamin, a big opportunity, many people believe. The sense is, when you hear about this, well, if the United States is going to charge $100,000 for these visas, just bring them here. What is the opportunity for Canadian tech companies? Yeah. So I think just to give a bit context here, I think it's important to sort of highlight that really for Canada, we've got to think about what are the short-term, long-term goals of our immigration policy? And so when we look at something like these changes south of the border, kind of two things sort of emerge. One is definitely the vibes, right? And I would say that the vibes that this is obviously giving is that is more difficult and you've got to clear hurdles in order to access the U.S. and couple that with what we're seeing with things like ICE and challenges of just entering even the U.S. as a two. tourists. When you say vibes, you just mean the mood in the United States right now. Do people want to live there? Yeah. And that really is a big issue here. Right. And we've actually seen historically when moving to the U.S. is more challenging. Canada often benefits. And we saw

this when Trump issued his last Muslim ban, not a Muslim ban to eight countries. And you know, people said, oh God, or in this case, Allah, you know, is this the place that we ultimately want to live? And so Canada was a net benefitter. So the vibes are definitely in the US more challenging for highly skilled workers. That said, Canada's got some own issues with its vibes where, you know, cost of living is really expensive. Housing is high. So that's one thing. Then the other is how does this policy actually work itself out? And this is where I think Jackson raises a good point, is that this is really going to impact not the most highly skilled of talented workers that are being paid literally hundreds, maybe millions of dollars a year.

This is just you got to pay Uncle Sam if you want to play in the sandbox, ultimately. But it is those workers that are potentially, you know, younger, graduates and we don't have the same caliber as those higher up that may potentially not enter the US. And here's where a risk comes in. Does Canada become a farm team, right? So Canada doesn't apply the same rules as the H-1B visa. We actually predominantly use the TN visa or we use the L1 visa to enter the US. And so the risk now is if those workers are struggling to get into the US from, let's say, China and India, will Canada become the farm team and be looking at these workers here. So there's definitely a risk component as we think about what this means

for our own domestic, our own domestic players. I just want to come back to that. Martin, we aren't Silicon Valley. Is there the opportunity? I mean, would people want to come here? Is there the infrastructure? What's the state of the tech industry here such that we might be able to lure people here? Yeah, very, very good question. So basically, there's just one important notes you have to do, both in Canada and United States, over 80% of our, of a STEM graduate studies, means master's and PhDs are foreign students. So when we are talking about domestic students, we are only talking about 20% in many of the things like quantum or, for example, Photonic, or many of the AI fields, this ratio is

almost 100% foreign students. So, and those foreign students are always using H1B to stay for this. So the goal here is not only to bring those people to come work for Canadian companies, but actually bring those jobs to Canada. These are the high-paying jobs. So what government of Canada can do is that to all those companies, both the startups and the big giants, they said, come to Canada, bring that job to Canada.

We allow you to bring those people to Canada. Either they're already in the US and they don't like the mood and they want to move to Canada or they're already in the foreign countries. and they can come to Canada. But what we want, we want to import the job alongside the talent. But would they want to come here? Of course, like in 2003, actually, Jackson, and we were in community tech, and there were like one policy idea came that let's give work visa to H-1B people,

and in 48 hours, 10,000 H-1B people applied. Jackson, what's your sense of that? Would people want to come here? Do we have the industry that could lure people who, perhaps might otherwise be shut out of the United States? Yeah, I mean, look, we're never going to do a one-to-one for the U.S. economy, right? There's going to be talent flight for a lot of the reasons that Ben and Martin mentioned, but that's also going to go to the UK. It's going to go to the UAE.

I think a lot of this is about the market signal that we send and saying, hey, look, we're open for business, and we have good programs to bring you here. Canada does have programs that have worked, right? Martin mentioned the H-1B equivalency visa program. There was the global talent stream can get people in, top engineers in a couple weeks, even a couple months. We also have a startup visa program. But the challenge, of course, is like, do we want them? Right? We're having our own big conversation in an immigration with temporary foreign workers. That can be emotionally charged, culturally charged, politically charged.

But I think, in contrast to the U.S., we can't really afford to have this back and forth, we're in a more vulnerable position. So I would challenge our national dialogue to reframe our immigration to primarily focus on competitiveness. There's no question we can bring people here. There's great companies that they could work for. But we really have to send that signal very strongly and kind of align as a country on saying, yes, we want to be the best place in the world for the best people to build and make sure we have all the policies needed to make that happen. Benjamin, I guess I ask in part because there was this study that got a lot of attention in the last couple of days by a venture capital firm in Toronto, the leaders fund, saying that

tech leaders are increasingly leaving this country at this accelerated rate. Why is that? Why don't people feel like this is a place where they can scale up and grow? Yeah. Yeah. So I commented on that story as well. And what I would say is that, you know, I think the previous government under the Trudeau government wasn't listening to the tech ecosystem and really understanding what was required for it to be successful. So what were they not hearing? So these were things like areas around capital gains as an issue, right, making it much more challenging for firms to be able to raise capital and in order to build their firms here. You know, other areas like procurement, right, where our government is overwhelmingly buying foreign tech over domestic. And so the issue is. is right. How do we build this right kind of climate? I think the things that, you know, the policy has begun to change and we're seeing a real shift there. So hopefully the reality is, people are leaving. Totally. And I think one thing though I do want to just sort of pull back to, specifically on the H-1B visa piece, is that typically when we do see this sort of tightening in the

US, we've often seen companies use Canada as what they've referred to as Ellis Island. And so what that means is that basically Microsoft, and there's, you know, historic record of this, we'll set up a dev shop in Vancouver. They'll bring in highly skilled workers from all over the world. They'll stick around Vancouver for a year. And then they'll go down to the US because they'll use the L1 transfer visa. So Canada often acts as actually just a holding tank for these really large firms. They're going to figure out how to get talent one way or another.

And so as we think about how we use immigration policy, right, are we using it to feed large American tech giants to navigate through U.S. public policy? Or are we actually using it to build domestic and, and, scale firms here in Canada. And so to Martin's point, I would definitely say, how do we leverage that? How do we actually bring not just jobs, but how do we bring entire companies to our country? And that's really where we're going to see wealth and prosperity opportunity for the country. So immigration policy is super nuanced. And I don't want us to get caught in sort of that previous space where we had really used our immigration tools to help support foreign companies.

We've got to think about how we support our domestic home team. Canadians love Canadian eggs. You can count on them to be fresh, local, and reliable, because for every egg, it takes a farmer. Up early, working hard, meeting Canada standards. And behind every egg farmer is supply management. A made-in-Canada system that delivers a steady supply of eggs produced right here at home. Learn more at eggfarmers.ca.com slash supply management.

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Without action, U.S. companies will target Canadian engineers, scientists, and health care professionals to bypass the fee by recruiting under the TN visa. This is something that we've all kind of been talking around. But if, to Benjamin's point, the country doesn't act in a way that, and Jackson mentioned this as well, that incentivizes those companies to set up here, what could we lose as a country, do you think? American companies and hospitals coming after our talent, regardless of whatever we do. Unless you go and renegotiate Kuzma right now and get rid of the TN visa, but still the TN visa is something the United States put it for Canadians. Because those companies and those hospitals have an enormous war chest and can lure people. Exactly.

Like we're only talking about tech talents, but look at the healthcare. Hospitals in the U.S. were bringing thousands of nurses. In fact, actually, my company was in that business, bringing... thousands of nurses from Philippine, India, Nigeria to United States. These nurses, they're making about $100,000 American dollar, much higher than Canadian dollar. Now, no hospital is going to pay $100,000 fees to bring a nurse. So what they do, they're going to look up north and they're going to come after Canadian nurses. Our healthcare system, we are already having shortage of nurses and doctors and those things. Same thing for the tech talent. So that risk is there.

And I don't think much we can do about it. So we are going to get, as he said, formed for the American companies, the Canadian citizens, means if before 50% of the STEM graduates of your Waterloo would go to US, now expect that number to be 80, 90%. On the other side now is like our response, we can also go and get the brightest companies to come here. We have our startup visa. I was talking to this Ohio company, raised over 100 million. said their top 25 scientists. Only one was born in the United States. Right now, that company is not Microsoft or Google with billions in cash that they can say just $100,000 each. The chance is what

he's saying. Go and our prime minister, our immigration, go call every single of these guys that said, move your entire company to Canada. Like we are similar law, similar time zone is very easy to say, come to Canada, I'll give you this incentive. And I give you this incentive. Bring your entire company here and we make the ecosystem here because look what is happening in the report on the globe, the leaders fund. Companies moving to America, this is the time we need to like reverse the fact and bring American companies here. Is there an opportunity, you raise the issue of vibes. Is there an opportunity to stress that, that the ecosystem in Canada, the political environment, how people feel about living here is different than maybe how some people would feel about living in the United States? Like, is that a card we should play?

Yeah, for sure. Look, I think our openness as a society is definitely one of our greatest benefits, right? I mean, the fact that we view ourselves as a multicultural society. And look, there has been some concerns around, you know, immigration in more recent years, not because of who the people are, but just because we haven't done the right public policies and built the things required to bring these people, right? It's not xenophobia that's fueling. Canadian concerns about immigration, it's actually cost of living. And so if we want to effectively use our immigration policy to, let's say, bring entrepreneurs and folks here, we've got to figure out how to drive down cost of living. So, you know, housing is a huge issue. If we don't figure out the housing crisis, the delta in terms of being able to afford to live here is more challenging. So we've got some housekeeping that we've got to do as a country on some of these bigger policies that definitely tie into economic growth and prosperity. But the net benefit is we're one of the few countries that is still very pro-immigrant, very pro-building our society with people that

come and join it. And definitely we should continue to use that positively. Jackson, are we training enough Canadian students to become these high-tech workers, the skilled high-tech workers that we're talking about here? Absolutely. I mean, we're training some of the best AI and quantum and sort of the top digital talent in the world. Of course, many of them are choosing to go to the U.S. I think it was maybe one and four of some of the top students from our elite schools. I think the question is how do we keep them here? So your sense is that we are doing that. The post-secondary institutions are actually providing the programs that are necessary for those companies, not of the future, but the companies now that are building the future. We have been for some of these top areas, like I mentioned,

like A& Quantum. The question is, you know, for our larger post-secondary education system, are we going to be training for all the jobs and sectors that are needed, let's say, in five years from now, obviously the international student cap has had a huge, huge effect on the inputs for our system. And so we may see different results in a few years. But in the last, you know, a couple decades, I mean, we have certainly produced some of the best town in the world. They're going down there.

They're going to go to the places where they feel like they can build, as has been rightly pointed out. That being said, at the same time, like, we shouldn't, we should also focus on building up the stuff that is working right. Like, at the same time, we do have many of the top AI companies in the world, many of the top quantum companies in the world that are globally competitive. And so sending a strong signal that, yes, that is being built here and actually being proud of that and telling those stories, I think what Ben said is really right.

Like the vibes do matter. You had the German minister come out yesterday and actually send out a video and say, hey, H-1Bs, we want you here. And here's what you can find in Germany. You can find a great place to live, great place to build. People are looking for stable leadership, a stable place to do that. And I think Canada can definitely lean into that. And hopefully that can both keep more of our great talent here, give them incentives to do that.

And then if we want to, we can continue to try and recruit more great talent from abroad. Martin, the story with you is you graduated at Waterloo. Then you went down to the States. Then you came back. Under Edge 1B, actually. But you came back here. Correct. Why did you come back?

Canada isn't Silicon Valley the promised land? So I went to Waterloo. 80% of the students in our STEM were actually foreigners. We were international students. We got recruited to go to a state, right? I went to state. And a couple of years later, I quit my job. I wanted to make a company, right?

And my brothers were in Canada as international students. There were no path to bring them to America. And Canada introduced this thing called a startup visa. So we made our company in Canada, in Waterloo. And that company, over time, became over 1,000 people company, over 300 we hired in Canada. It became a multi-billion dollar company. just because of one a smart immigration policy

called Startup Visa. If at that time, I was already in America, if America had that plan and my brothers could have come to America. You would have moved everybody down there. We would have made that company in America. But because Canada introduced that,

you were like, okay, so let's just start the company here and it became one of the biggest tech unicorns in Canada. So this is the same opportunity that we are talking about. You've got to act fast and we need the leaders of this country to go on a picture, go on a video, and call it out to the smartest people on planet Earth and says, we want you here.

But of what Jackson was saying that the Germans did. So this is what we can give you. And like I'm 10 years in the business of business. Canadian people want that. They're like they want people to come here and start jobs for Canadian, build jobs, spend money, make our economy better. we Canadians, they're basically they're not happy about immigration

when they're like, you could see unproductive portion of the immigration that they come, say, look, we already paying too much taxes. We want our taxes to go lower. Why are we bringing people that dependent on the system massively, like in the hundreds of thousands of people? We are talking about right now here that people to bring that every single one of them

can create hundreds and thousands of jobs for Canadians for our children here. spend that money here and make our economy better, they go to their restaurant, so there would be more restaurant jobs, they would be more farming jobs, and so on and so on in our economy. Benjamin, last word to you, just in a, we have a few seconds left. What is, what do we lose if the country doesn't seize this opportunity? Look, I think we learn we lose potentially opportunity to bring some of the, you know, brightest minds to the country and really establish ourselves as a, as a beachhead of places where people can build companies and

create opportunity. So, you know, getting our immigration minister and, and, and our leaders out there advocating for policies that help advance domestic companies and bringing those highly skilled workers here, I think, is the right play. You confident that we'll get it right? Yeah, I am. You are. Yeah, all right. We'll check back in on that.

I appreciate you all being here. Thank you very much. Thank you for having us. Jackson Khan is the CEO of AAPTC, former policy advisor for industry science and economic development Canada. He was in Montreal. Benjamin Bergen is the president of the Council of Canadian Innovators. Martin Basiri is CEO and founder of Passage.

They were both in our Toronto studio. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.