[neptunespear]

Vancouver has been a popular place to transfer foreign talent to the U.S. for years. It's a short drive to Seattle, a short flight to San Francisco, and in the same time zone as both cities.

Famously, Facebook had an office in Coal Harbour that was just for transferring hires to Menlo Park, they didn't hire any Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

Even more famously, Microsoft's recent expansion in Vancouver, the "Excellence Centre" (doubling its workforce from 400 in Yaletown to 800), was mostly going to be for L-1 visa transfers to Redmond HQ. 360 of those positions were planned, with MS only promising 40 positions (5%) for citizens/PRs. The former Conservative government offered winking acknowledgement. However, voters in Canada were furious when the mass abuse of the TFW program came to light, which forced the government's hand.

The vast majority of positions at the "Excellence Centre" (which was opened by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and houses ~650 engineers as of now) have gone to locals. Anecdotally, I've heard that ever since the TFW backlash, the most popular cities in which to open visa transfer offices have been London and Zurich.

If you want to see the documents proving that MS was mostly going to hire visa transfers in Vancouver, documents obtained by CBC News under the province's access to information laws show what were the draft plans: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1685182-b-c-atip-doc...

[timthelion]

How is the border between the US and Canada these days? When I went skiing at Wistler, it took us longer to wait to cross the border than it took us to drive from Seattle to the border!