Driven crazy by US immigration policy, Microsoft Corp. executives decided to drive some of their employees north. Unable to land enough visas for a third of the foreign-born engineers and computer scientists it wanted to hire — many of them newly minted graduates of US universities — the Washington-based company opened a software development centre just over the Canadian border in 2007. About 150 people now work in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“Our immigration system makes it very difficult for US firms to hire highly skilled foreign workers,” Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told Congress in March as he pleaded for more visas. “At a time when talent is the key to economic success, it makes no sense to educate people in our universities, often subsidised by US taxpayers, and then insist that they return home.”

Frustrated by the limited number of these so-called H-1B visas for highly skilled foreigners awarded each spring in a lottery, US technology executives have tried to find ways around the problem while lobbying to increase the annual cap.

Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Intel Corp. and other large companies have opened or expanded research facilities outside the United States. And some companies have resorted to gaming the system: filing multiple applications, along with the $1,570 to $3,320 filing fee, for each potential hire to boost the odds of winning one of the coveted visas.

“You can imagine our frustration,” said Robert Hoffman, vice president of government affairs at Oracle, which, like Microsoft, insisted it has not filed duplicate applications. “We have 1,000 job openings at Oracle we can’t fill because of the arbitrary nature of visas and the arbitrary way they are selected.”

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