As cross-border work normalizes, employers face a mounting immigration, tax, and reputational exposure without adequate governance in place
The way Canadian organizations manage their people’s movement across borders has changed fundamentally – and most HR teams haven’t kept pace. As cross-border work shifts from structured international assignments to informal arrangements involving remote work, frequent business travel, and digital nomad arrangements, compliance obligations have multiplied without a corresponding evolution in governance.
The risks are unlike anything the industry has previously navigated, says Jack Kim, Partner in the Toronto office of Fragomen, a global immigration services firm. “The global mobility environment is quite in flux and you have a lot of tensions grappling against each other,” says Kim. He says that demand for global talent is surging in priority sectors including defence, energy, and infrastructure, but political headwinds at home and abroad are complicating access to that talent as enforcement tightens worldwide.
The data underscores the problem. According to global workforce management firm ECA’s Global Mobility Now 2026 study, two-thirds of global employers have no formal process for reviewing compliance implications, such as immigration limits or internal company thresholds. With nearly half of organizations in the study expecting business travel to increase and international remote work to grow over the next two years, that gap is only widening.
When informal mobility becomes a liability
Compliance problems rarely begin with a policy failure, says Kim. More often, they start with a routine trip. An employee travels repeatedly to a client in the U.S. A specialist is dispatched to an overseas facility under no formal assignment structure. None of these situations looks like a traditional global mobility file – but each can trigger payroll obligations, immigration requirements and corporate tax exposure simultaneously, he says.
“Especially on the tax front, it’s a pain in the butt to track where are my employees on any given day,” Kim says, noting that technology helps but there are also cultural questions to be considered. “And that has increased the need for employers to be able to do exactly what governments are trying to do. Where is a person on any given day? Are there a certain number of days that trigger a tax complication or an immigration complication as well? And then how do I do it?”
When individual non-compliance goes undetected, the consequences rarely stay contained. Kim points to a recent U.S. enforcement action at a battery plant in Atlanta involving a Korean company, as a cautionary example of how quickly a workforce issue becomes a geopolitical one. “Hundreds of people were apprehended at the same time, and it caused lots of news stories and consternation from governments,” he says. “It turned into a bilateral issue and a geopolitical issue.”
Kim cautions Canadian organizations against treating such scenarios as distinctly American. “This could also happen in different countries as well because the number one question, especially in countries that are facing populist-type movements, is that they don’t want people to be working illegally inside their country, and no political party wants to own that as part of a scandal.”
The case for centralized mobility governance
The decentralized approach many organizations default to – leaving individual entities or regional HR teams to manage their own immigration processes independently – is no longer adequate. Leaving immigration or compliance processes siloed across business units or provinces is a structural liability at this stage of regulatory complexity, according to Kim. “Those days are probably over because of all the complexities that you have to think about, and the dependencies between everything that happens,” he says.
Greater visibility at the executive level is equally important. Kim uses the example of a travel ban enacted by Canada during a public health emergency in Africa from Ebola to illustrate how a mobility gap becomes a leadership crisis overnight. “If you don’t know where your people are, and if you have a facility in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then you need to know who’s there right now visiting, and that immediately becomes a C-suite issue, whether you like it or not.”
The model Kim advocates is cross-functional by design, integrating immigration, tax, travel management, technology and HR business partners into a unified framework. Organizations building cross-border workforce compliance frameworks that address immigration, tax, and travel risk, as well as balance global hiring with cross-border compliance obligations, are better placed to manage the dependencies that determine whether international moves succeed or stall, he says.
“Those things should be thought of at the front end of decision-making, not at the back end,” Kim says. “Be proactive about these things, increasing visibility within your own companies, having policies in place and game planning, crisis control – because more often than not, as we've seen with the wars going on in the Middle East and in Ukraine, there's some more strategic planning that needs to be done and you cannot be reactive anymore.”
Canada’s regulatory reset and what it means for HR
Canada’s immigration system is itself in transition. Tighter temporary resident targets and the pending transfer of International Mobility Program (IMP) compliance oversight from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) signal a more enforcement-focused posture from Ottawa for employers navigating the process of hiring foreign workers.
Kim describes the recalibration that began in 2024 as “in spirit necessary” – a response to documented system fraud, housing shortages, and strained school capacity. But he warns that the recalibration must be carefully managed. “What we need to do as a country going forward is to think of things in a much more intentional and calculated manner, strategic,” he says.
He points to a recent government initiative prioritizing permanent residence pathways for high-wage workers as a constructive signal, but stresses that Canada’s capacity needs make continued access to international talent non-negotiable. “We want to build submarines, but we’re contracting a foreign company to build them for us for the next 30 years,” he says. “If we want to build pipelines, then we need people to help us build those because the talent doesn’t all reside in Canada.”
With below-replacement birth rates now recorded across 37 of 38 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries according to the OECD’s Pensions at a Glance 2025 report, the competition for skilled talent will only intensify. HR leaders monitoring Canada’s evolving immigration policy landscape and its impact on workforce strategy should treat government engagement – through their own C-suite or government relations functions – as a core part of their long-term planning, according to Kim.
“We’re going to be competing for the same people across the world for years to come,” he says.
Duty of care in a volatile world
As geopolitical risk becomes a standard feature of the global operating environment, duty of care for internationally mobile employees has shifted from a compliance consideration to a strategic imperative. Kim, who was involved in emergency evacuation efforts during the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul in 2021, knows precisely what inadequate planning looks like. “That was a real frantic couple of weeks when we were trying to get people out of the country,” he says.
Knowing where employees are, what travel authorizations they hold, and where they can be safely relocated is foundational. Organizations can plan for global immigration and labour mobility trends in advance – mapping visa-free travel options, identifying jurisdictions where an entity can provide temporary shelter and defining what a safe relocation pathway looks like before a crisis demands one. HR teams developing proactive duty-of-care and crisis response programs for internationally mobile employees are increasingly setting the standard expected by both regulators and the workforce itself.
As enforcement intensifies globally – such as stricter border rules that could impact business travellers – Kim says the penalties for non-compliance will follow. “Companies are more in the crosshairs too,” he says, pointing to major corporations in the U.S. that have faced restrictions on sponsoring foreign workers following fraud-related allegations. The reputational damage, he notes, arrives well before any verdict.
“Whether those allegations have been proven or not is a different thing, but once you’re in the headlines, you’re in the headlines,” says Kim. “And so these things will likely be used more at a higher level to cut things off at the pass.”
