| Reversing the brain drain will certainly be difficult, but stemming the flow of graduates is perhaps a different story. For Canadians considering working in the US, the recent politically-motivated detentions and deportations against green card holders - a group that has significantly stronger rights of abode than TN visa holders under USMCA - certainly factors into the calculus of whether a US job is worth it. Further, the appeal of the American political environment is inversely correlated with the distance between one's personal characteristics and the feature vector of able-bodied, white, male, cisgender, and heterosexual. This is nothing new, but the importance of these characteristics, especially the last three or four, have dramatically increased with the rightward shift of the US over the past few years - and there are also more individuals in Canadian STEM (i.e. TN-eligible) degrees than ever before who don't have these characteristics. Just to put some HN-relevant ballpark numbers to it, the University of Waterloo, a notorious Silicon Valley hiring pool, is reporting 38.6% women [0] in their 2024 engineering admissions. This was 21.2% in 2014 [1], the earliest year with statistics available. I don't think it is much of a stretch to say the 2014 first years were more likely to aspire to intern at, say, Tesla or Meta than the 2024 first years (who will be entering their first co-op internships in a month's time). That is a function of both the American tech companies having cozied up to the political right, and an increased proportion of the students being both more directly affected [2] and morally repulsed [3] by this state of affairs. Add an additional nationalism multiplier for Canadians being turned off by the annexation rhetoric coming out of the US, and I think we may see a change in this trend towards Canada retaining more of its local talent. [0] https://uwaterloo.ca/engineering/about/faculty-engineering-s... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140804070109/https://uwaterloo... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/27/roe-wa... [3] https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12... |