Strategies to work around US immigration policies are starting to become more creative, and bizarre. An author at CEOs for Cities is reporting that a consultant speaker at the Mayor’s Hemispheric Forum this week will advocate that the best strategy to revive Detroit is to partner with Windsor, Ontario Canada.
The logic goes, apparently, that because of a shortage of H1-B visas allowing skilled foreigners to live and work in the USA, cities like Detroit cannot re-energize their economies and shift the business base further into the knowledge economy. Therefore, under this theory, US companies should set up partner operations in nearby Canadian cities, as it is much easier for the talented to immigrate to Canada. The recent announcement of Microsoft’s new Vancouver-area operation (a 2 hours’ drive north of its Redmond Washington headquarters), is cited as an example.
Should America’s knowledge economy leaders follow this advice, it will certainly benefit Canada’s urban and national economies. But what about America’s cities?
Will such a cross-border urban business partnership really bring more companies to Detroit? If you’re a large knowledge economy company looking to expand operations in North America, why not just skip Detroit and Windsor and set up in Toronto with its bigger population and more dynamic urban cultural and economic scene?
If the plan is to help Detroit-area companies expand, then it might have a little more merit. However, if many or most of the new jobs end up in Windsor Ontario, how much will Detroit really benefit? The border region could certainly develop particular clusters and become known for that. But if any other company then decides they want to operate in the region, they will also likely need to choose Windsor as their base of operations in order to find their own workforce. (If Detroit had enough talented workers to support knowledge economy growth or cluster growth, then presumably the current and future residents of Windsor would not be required.) So again, how does Detroit really benefit here?
Maybe the hope is that building a dynamic Detroit-Windsor region will make more talented Americans want to move to Detroit. That could benefit the city. But it seems like an event at the end of a series of difficult-to-achieve ventures.
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This is stupid, but not because Windsor isn’t cool. Detroit’s problems go far something as simple as this. The auto industry that is based in Detroit has an uninnovative ecology cf. Saxenian’s comparison of firms in the Rte. 128 corridor in Boston vs. the Silicon Valley.
There is no shortage of innovative capable people in Michigan. I once was one of them. Michigan’s auto industry funded the creation of a superb higher education system including U of Michigan, Michigan State, and the urban Wayne State University–few states in the U.S. have as many great institutions (other than California, which now has 7+ times the population of Michigan).
But because bigness has shaped the industrial economy there, it is very difficult for innovative new firms to rise up.
Not to mention the big labor issue complementing the big business problem cf. Adams’ _Bigness Complex_. I mean, here is a company getting its clock cleaned by Toyota–GM–and the workers are striking?!
You raise some good points…I agree that Detroit’s problems are so much larger than simply attracting knowledge economy workers and companies (if a talent shortage even exists in Detroit, which you suggest isn’t proven at all). Richard Florida has blogged a few times about the need for new business and economic leadership in Detroit and related for new HQ locations and leadership at the big 3 automakers.
it should be “far beyond something as simple as this”
It is interesting that GM’s Shanghi design team won the recent competition to design the new Buicks. That Detroit is looking abroad for new ideas cannot bode well for the growth of the knowledge sector in the Detroit area.