Trump’s ill-timed, poorly planned Muslim ban did make someone very happy:
A Toronto immigration lawyer says the time is ripe for Canada's technology sector to take advantage of the uncertainty created by a recent clampdown on immigration by President Donald Trump. …
"Right now there is a huge skill shortage when it comes to tech individuals," Stephen Green, a partner with the Toronto-based law firm Green-Spiegel who specializes in immigration law, told The Morning Edition host Craig Norris Wednesday.
"You've got some highly skilled people in the United States now that are quite candidly stuck or can't come back into into SIlicon Valley if they left," he said.
Meanwhile, on the side of the border where the Statue of Liberty looks increasingly ironic, the 100,000+ visas already chopped off by Trump’s ban are having an impact on science and technology.
In the days since President Trump signed the executive order, it has already disrupted science communities in the United States and around the globe. Students and researchers have found themselves trapped out of the country, seen field work plans scuttled, or had long-awaited visits canceled. For many scientists engaged in the work of understanding and addressing the world's next great challenge—a changing climate and the transition to cleaner energy sources—it's clear that you can't stifle immigration without stifling innovation, too.
If Republicans knew that Trump’s order was destroying the next generation of clean energy jobs, they would … definitely cheer even louder, since dragging out the transition from fossil fuels to generate maximum dollars to smokestack power is right at the top of their to-do list. But that’s not the limits of the damage.
"We live in an extremely competitive global environment," says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Just because we want to do this ‘America First' thing doesn't mean the rest of the world is going to stop being entrepreneurial and get out of the way."
Many of us don’t “want to do this ‘America First’ thing,” but just because we’re not supporting Trump’s actions, doesn’t mean we’re not suffering from their effects.
In general, the less open a society is, the more likely its scientists and innovators are to go elsewhere—and for a long time, that "elsewhere" has been the United States.
For a long time … but not this time. With Donald Trump slamming doors and threatening worse, scientists are looking for other nations where freedom is more respected. And it’s not just a matter of scientists from the nations where the ban is currently in effect. More scientists are worried about how the rules might expand to include them, or how the ban might damage research teams. Even American scientists are looking for an out as they find both research partners—and research funds—heading elsewhere.
The problem is increasingly impacting America’s top technology companies.
More than 30 CEOs at the nation's largest tech companies—including Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Uber—have signed onto a letter criticizing President Donald Trump's executive order temporarily banning all refugees and citizens of seven of Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. …
The executives who've signed the letter represent many of the most prominent and powerful companies in the tech industry. Other companies who joined the letter, according to the source, include Twitter, eBay, PayPal, Netflix, and Dropbox. None of the companies mentioned in this story immediately responded to requests for comment.