Amir Moravej, an Iranian computer engineer in Montreal, quietly worked last year on building software to help people navigate the Canadian immigration system. He saw it as a way for others to avoid the same immigration travails he suffered a few years earlier.
Then came the American presidential election. “Trump accelerated everything,” said Mr. Moravej, 33, the chief executive of a software start-up named Botler AI.
With immigration taking center stage in American politics and elsewhere, Botler AI began putting more resources into building a chatbot tailored to one of Canada’s immigration programs. On Wednesday, the start-up plans to announce that Yoshua Bengio, a research pioneer in artificial intelligence and director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, is joining the fledgling company as a strategy adviser.
Mr. Bengio is adding his intellectual firepower to ease the way for what could become a migration of high-tech talent. Canada stands to benefit from the American political climate and the Trump administration’s efforts — stalled in court so far — to sharply restrict travel into the United States from six predominantly Muslim nations. After Mr. Trump’s election, applications to Canada for student and temporary visas surged.
Canadian Colleges See Surge of Foreign Students. It’s Not Just Politics.
How Immigration Helps Canada
Yet when it comes to immigration, Canada’s policies are anything but effete. Instead, they’re ruthlessly rational, which is why Canada now claims the world’s most prosperous and successful immigrant population.
The numbers tell the tale. Last year, Canada admitted more than 320,000 newcomers — the most on record. Canada boasts one of the highest per-capita immigration rates in the world, about three times higher than the United States. More than 20 percent of Canadians are foreign-born; that’s almost twice the American total, even if you include undocumented migrants. And Ottawa plans to increase the number in the years ahead.
Far from producing a backlash, Canadian voters couldn’t be happier about it. Recent polls show that 82 percent think immigration has a positive impact on the economy, and two-thirds see multiculturalism as one of Canada’s key positive features. (They rank it higher than hockey. Hockey!) Support for immigration has actually increased in recent years, despite a slow economy and the specter of terrorism. Today in Canada, the share of people who approve of the way their government handles the issue is twice as high as it is in the United States.
