[TMWNN]

>In my anecdotal evidence, I'd estimate that ~1/3 of my Canadian engineering graduating class are now in the US, either working or researching at US institutions, with most of these folks representing the top 1/3 of the class.

Similarly, in a IEEE survey of scientists from 16 countries <http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>, the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two. If you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://np.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the_...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat: 16% of *all* Canadian scientists move to the US. As you noted, they're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.

By comparison, 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada, so about 1.6-1.7% total. Since the US has nine times more people, that means that in absolute numbers the 1.7% of American scientists is about equal to the 16% of Canadian scientists, but there is no reason to think that the 1.7% makes up the top tier of American scientists; why would the best move north of the border? In other words, the US is receiving the best of Canadian scientists in exchange for an equal number of its non-best.

[908B64B197]

Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of Canadians expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Canadians could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).

Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and its Universities were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent.

Canada sure had a lot of "talent" immigrate in the meantime, but from my observations it's mostly people who can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier and the quotas are close to 10x per capita compared to the US). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary.

It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for Canadian nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US.

[TMWNN]

> Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country.

I can't find the article now, but the well-publicized crash of Canadian immigration's website on US election day 2016 was actually because of maintenance, not because hordes of Americans hoping to flee north overwhelmed the site.

>Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower"

This was repeated so often that it became a punchline in /r/canada.

>Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary.

My understanding is that this is the norm for FAANG offices in Canada: Mostly non-North American people who are either waiting for a US visa or (as you said) can't get one, plus the odd Canadian who wants to stay home for family or personal reasons.