Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:20 on 11 September 2021

Not been posting here much recently because I have been preoccupied with the upcoming move to Vancouver, BC. Or should I say, the potential upcoming move.

You see, my potential employer had been operating under what I call “the child’s conception of NAFTA*.” Which is, upon hearing that the “FT” stands for “free trade,” to conclude based on its name alone that one knows all there is to know about the agreement. In this case, it means assuming cross-border hire is only very slightly more complex than hiring someone from another Canadian province. Just tell the hiree to apply for a work permit under that agreement, wait a few weeks for perfunctory approval, problem solved.

Um, no, that’s not how it works. Back in the day, I remember right-wing, ultra-capitalist libertarians whining about how NAFTA was false advertising because it really didn’t usher in complete free trade. Well, from their standpoint, they had a point, because it did not. National borders still very much exist and they still very much matter. Yes, there are easy-to-get work permits under that agreement, but they are limited to 63 quite narrow and precisely defined job categories, and a software developer is not among them.

So the intervening weeks have been a process of educating first myself, and then transferring that knowledge to my potential employer, who to this day remains of the general belief that they do not want to get super heavily-involved in the process. Which makes the outcome uncertain, because as Canadian immigration law is written, the employer basically does have to be quite heavily involved in my situation.

One can argue that this should not be the case, given the shortage of software people in Canada. That, however, is a policy advocacy position and not a statement of political fact. The fact is that hiring developers from abroad is not currently so easy or simple.

So this whole exercise may well come to naught so far as they are concerned. It won’t be a total loss from my standpoint, however, as going through it has enabled me to learn about which Vancouver employers are willing to be involved in the process of hiring from abroad (due to the software developer shortage, there is a motive for them to do so). Those are going to be my focus from this point onward, of course.

* And yes, the agreement is no longer officially called NAFTA. It is, depending on what country one resides, USMCA, CUSMA, or T-MEC. (Note how each acronym puts one’s own nation’s name first. But of course. Ah, nationalism. But I digress.) People tend to remember the fact that it’s basically a renegotiated NAFTA, however, and still judge the overall nature of the agreement by its original name.