Microsoft is looking for a few hundred more software geniuses to staff its new development center. The new office will be close to its Redmond headquarters, but not too close: it will be opening in Vancouver, B.C., and Microsoft cites tough U.S. immigration laws as the reason. The company says the kind of talent it needs is in short supply in North America, and it wants to attract highly-trained workers from all over the world, including folks trained at U.S. universities who are unable to legally work here. Although skilled workers can qualify for H1-B visas, there are only so many of those visas available, and according to the L.A. Times:

The demand for H-1B visas for high-skilled immigrants has become so much greater than the supply that almost twice as many applications arrived in a single day as there were slots available for the year — 65,000, plus 20,000 for those with advanced degrees from U.S. schools.

Meanwhile, Canada’s borders are wide open to skilled workers, particularly those in the tech industry. Microsoft says this, plus Vancouver’s position as a “global gateway,” is its reason for moving north.

This is probably not just dissembling on Microsoft’s part. If Microsoft was purely interested in cutting costs, they could open the center in India or China, where it could recruit skilled workers from those countries and still benefit from lower costs. Vancouver is not a cheap place to do business, and with the Canadian dollar fast approaching par with the U.S. dollar, it’s becoming more expensive by the day. And in Canada, unlike in the U.S., skilled workers aren’t tied to a sponsoring employer, which means other businesses are competing for the same talent.

The few hundred software engineers that Microsoft hires at its new facility will need to be joined by a significant cadre of support staff, who will probably come from the local labor pool. And the high salaries they’ll be bringing in will ripple through Vancouver’s already booming economy. You’d think this would be a wake-up call for the U.S., and maybe for some it will be. But no matter how many times this happens, plenty of people will persist in believing that a restrictive U.S. immigration policy protects U.S. jobs. And with the recent crash-and-burn of the latest immigration reform effort, which would have made the U.S. skilled worker program a lot more like Canada’s, it looks like this sort of thing is bound to continue for awhile to come.