There is often much said on strategic immigration and the competitive battle for the world’s most gifted workers. A recent interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in the Detroit Free Press drives home the negative externalities from limiting the brightest from our shores. Ballmer discusses why in 2007 Microsoft built an R&D facility in Vancouver – just over the border from their Redmond, Washington headquarters in Canada in 2007. Ballmer stated Microsoft
opened the lab in Vancouver because [they] were having trouble getting visas for the best and the brightest to come to Seattle. The Canadian government said, ‘We’re happy to have those people.’
Related to this, I’ve recently been pondering what the multiplier effect on an H1B visa is. The US government grants about 100,000 H1B visas a year which grant foreign workers in speciality occupations the right to work in the United States and of course H1B visas are heavily used by tech companies. While not scientific Ballmer suggests the multiplier is high:
It’s a bit goofy because for every person we hire to be an engineer, there’s probably another four or five people who we employ at Microsoft. There’s another set of people employed in the community in construction and housing and retail, a bunch of different industries.
