A trip to San Francisco last week included a few meetings with startup entrepreneurs and the discussions inevitably turned to one topic — immigration.

This subject is never far from the minds of senior teams in growth-stage companies in Atlantic Canada. But it isn’t limited to the East Coast of Canada. It’s woven into the fabric of startup life everywhere. If you run a high-growth company, you’ve educated yourself in the ways to attract the best possible expertise.

Innovative companies live on two things — capital and talent. The need for capital can be eased over time by increasing cash flow, but the need for specialized talent is insatiable. And the people with specialization, especially in high-demand fields like blockchain, robotics and artificial intelligence, show a willingness or eagerness to go where they can find the best opportunity.

For our lifetime and the foreseeable future, those opportunities are concentrated most heavily in Northern California. (According to Angel List, there are about 33,000 startups just in Silicon Valley, compared with 13,000 in all of Canada.) The Bay Area is something akin to Rome in the ancient world. It’s the place all ambitious tech people, including Canadians, long to be. This is a global yearning as brainy people from every country in the world have at least considered trying to get to Silicon Valley.

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But things began to change 17 months ago. Donald Trump was elected president and the whole dynamic started to shift. Northern California is still the promised land but more and more people are questioning whether to move there, or anywhere else in the U.S. Some are worried about tighter immigration policies and some just don’t want to be part, however tangentially, of contributing to a country whose current administration they dislike.

Canada, it seems, is becoming an attractive alternative.

“Canadian companies are not only staying in Canada, but using new high-skill immigration programs to compete for talent on the global stage, and compete successfully,” said Sean Lynch, one of the Canadian-born entrepreneurs I met last week. “There’s an opportunity for Canadian companies now to pull the great talent, that would have historically migrated to the U.S., to Canada instead. We’re seeing it with tech startups; we’re seeing it with research.”

A Saskatoon native and U Waterloo grad, Lynch is the founder of The Eh List, a support network for Canadian founders in the Bay Area. The group has regular events and in the last month it did something for the first time: it had a briefing co-hosted with the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco on immigrating to Canada. The event was well attended, including entrepreneurs and tech specialists from the U.S. and — most important — other countries. Expats from around the world are arriving in Silicon Valley and showing an interest in moving on to Canada.

It’s an opportunity for Canadian companies, including those on the East Coast. Word on the street is people are most interested in moving to Vancouver or Toronto, but many are considering the opportunity more than the city. Atlantic Canada has growing companies that can compete in this race for talent.