May 21, 2022

More than a million Indians, with advanced degrees and mostly engineering and other technical jobs in the U.S., are awaiting approval of their permanent resident, or green card, visas.

Of these, “more than 200,000 (are) likely to die before they could conceivably receive a green card,” unless the law is changed, according to a Cato Institute analysis of the official immigration and related data. The current estimated wait time for a green card, for an Indian, is around seventeen years, assuming the applicant works for the same employer – which would be unusual given the regular job cuts by U.S. based companies.

Each year, Indians are eligible for only about 9000, or 7% of the 140,000 green cards issued, which is the maximum quota allotted to each country. Overall, about half of the Indian applicants are unlikely to get green cards, the Cato report adds. A green card enables the holder to work and live permanently in the U.S., including switching jobs if needed.  

Canada, which welcomes skilled immigrants since it faces a shortage of labor and also has a population which is rapidly aging, has been a big beneficiary of the restrictive work visa policies in the U.S. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, IBM and other large U.S. companies have expanded their hiring in Canada. They can easily hire the skilled foreigners they need in Canada, including from India, bypassing the work visa issues faced by foreigners in the U.S.

In fact, during the five years ending 2021, Canadian cities were the major gainers in technology jobs in North America, according to a report by CBRE, a Dallas, Texas based commercial real estate services and investment firm. Toronto benefitted the most, adding 81,200 jobs, while producing 26,338 tech degrees in the same time period “for a net brain gain of 54,862 tech jobs.” Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Vancouver and Halifax are other Canadian cities with good gains in tech jobs.

The big U.S. companies operating in Canada typically hire through their internal human resource departments. Small and medium companies in the U.S. can hire staff in Canada through recruiters like MobSquad, Terminal and other Canadian companies.

The recruiters also hire technologists to provide staff on a contract basis in Canada. “We make starting a virtual subsidiary in Canada easy for US companies – enabling companies to keep their technology talent facing US work visa issues or build a team of highly-skilled technology professionals,” in Canada, according to a post by Calgary based MobSquad.

Canadian recruiters actively seek to attract Indians and other foreigners, with advanced technical degrees in the U.S., frustrated by the expiry of work visas or the uncertainty and long wait for green cards. “I applied for the H-1B (U.S. work) visa lottery every year, and unfortunately, I was still unsuccessful on my final attempt,” notes Abhishekh Jindal, on a blog post on MobSquad’s site. He moved from India to earn a B.Sc.  in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. “Fortunately, my current company and I reached out to MobSquad,” adds Jindal, who now works from Vancouver, Canada. 

“After six years in the United States on an H-1B visa, which was set to expire, I was preparing to return to India,” writes Vikash Kumar on the blog post. Then he got a Canadian work visa and moved to Halifax, Canada. “With MobSquad I am still working with the same company and managing the same projects and clients,” as he did in the U.S. “Through MobSquad, my wife got an open work permit…and now she has a job.  She couldn’t get a work permit in the US,” adds Kumar.

As in Jindal and Kumar’s case, Mobsquad offers a solution to U.S. employers of foreigners facing work visa obstacles: contract out the job to them in Canada and the employee will move to Canada and continue working on the same job, on a work visa, within six to eight weeks. The employee’s spouse will also get a Canadian work visa.   

“We hire a US company’s highly skilled foreign technology workers with unsuccessful US work visa applications and move them to Canada.  We then contract them back to the US company on an exclusive, long-term basis. MobSquad manages the ongoing administrative processes of having talent in Canada, including immigration support, resettlement services, payroll, legal, tax, human resources, real estate, benefits administration, and accounting.

Nearly half of the 30,000 professionals from around the world, in the Calgary based MobSquad’s database, have at least a Masters’ degree in technology, with a tenth of them being PhDs. Four out of five have skills in fields seeing big and rising demand from employers, namely artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, data engineering, mobile development and cloud computing.

MobSquad has more than 50 clients including Betterment, a robo-financial advisor based in New York, with a valuation of $1.3 billion, and Cinarra, a mobile data analytics system used by marketers, based in Santa Clara, California, with a reported valuation of more than $50 million.

With 29 employees listed on its LinkedIn page, MobSquad has offices in Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax in addition to Calgary. Founded in 2018 by Irfhan Rawji, who is also the CEO, the company has raised $9 million in venture capital funding, including from Relay Ventures.

Since 2016, Rawji, 44-years-old, has been a partner at Relay Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on mobile computing with offices in Toronto and Menlo Park, California. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia; Board Chair of The Organic Box, Alberta’s largest organic food hub, offering home delivery as well as click-and-collect grocery services; on the board of Canadian Western Bank; and an advisor to the Canadian government’s Impact and Innovation Unit.

Earlier, Rawji was a Vice President of Strategy at Parkland Fuel, Calgary; and a Principal at Birch Hill Equity Partners. Following an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 2004, he worked as an associate at McKinsey, the consulting company. Prior to his MBA, Rawji worked as an analyst for Accenture. He holds a BCom from the University of British Columbia, 2000.

MobSquad’s business has grown more than five-fold over the past two years, boosted by demand during the pandemic. “Immigration to the USA is unpredictable and I don’t see that changing anytime soon,” writes Venkata Doodala in a MobSquad blog post. Indians facing work visa uncertainty in the U.S. “should consider moving to Canada for a more stable life without much concern about immigration issues.” 

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