Actually no. Unlike the US, Canada likes letting in immigrants and has a fairly efficient process for applying for immigrant status. If you have marketable skills, or are related to a Canadian by blood or marriage, then it’s fairly easy to get landed immigrant status. If you don’t have a job offer from a Canadian company, your marketable skills are evaluated on a point based system and it’s not that difficult to have the requisite number of points. Expect to spend a few grand on fees and lawyers and about a year waiting for your application to go through the process.
@cameronh1403: Here’s the Government of Canada website for immigration applications
ETA: you need 35 points to qualify as a self-employed immigrant (there are different sets of criteria for other categories like high demand professions or wealthy people). Being of prime working age gets you 10 points. Having a Bachelor’s degree gets you 20 points. Speaking, reading, and writing English fluently gets you 16 points. If you are also fluent in French, add another 8 points. If you’ve run a small business for two years in the past 5, add another 20 points. So, yeah, at least on paper, qualifying as a skilled worker is not all that difficult. I am not an immigration lawyer and you should hire one before embarking on this kind of thing (because the process is not anything like as byzantine as the US process, the legal fees shouldn’t be more than a couple grand).
