President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order barring foreign workers from filling 525,000 jobs. Some agricultural and health-care workers are exempted, as are the roughly 20,000 workers who come to the U.S. to work as child-care providers, or “au pairs.” Monday’s order also extends a ban on issuing green cards to foreigners looking to live in the U.S. Rana Sarkar, consul general of Canada in San Francisco, told The Logic, “The COVID crisis is a step function accelerant of the shift to digital, and in the race to scale attracting top talent from anywhere in the world with a strong path to citizenship is a key Canadian advantage. Lots of folks looking north right now and that’s a good thing for us.” (The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Logic)

Talking point: The new restrictions won’t apply to people who have already been granted visas, whether or not they’re currently in the U.S. The U.S. grants 85,000 H-1B visas to highly skilled professionals every year, but rejection rates have been increasing since Trump took office. Some tech companies have pushed back against the order, saying it will hurt their ability to recruit needed talent from overseas. Trump’s immigration crackdowns have previously helped Canada’s tech sector. In December 2018, my colleague Murad reported that thousands of highly skilled immigrants were leaving the U.S. to come to Canada.