Given Canada and Mexico’s geographic proximity to the US and that there are no limit set on the TN visa/status issued every year, one would expect that the number of TN issued every year will be ridiculously high, right?   Well yes and no.  Here’s why.

Thanks to Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA), we were able to pull up some quick stats on TN, TD, and some other visas for 2012.

In 2012, only a whopping 7,638 TN visas were issued!  How does this compare to the more well-known work visa called H1B?  For starters, the limit set on H1B (excluding exemptions) is already at 65,000 but with renewals from prior H1B holders, the total number of H1B’s issued in 2012 was 135,530.   That is almost 20 times more than TN’s!

But wait, TN visa/status is only for Mexican and Canadian citizens so if you compare the number of issued visas to the overall country population, the percentage is actually not that far off.  Not only that, the ratio of TN issued to Canadian is 3+ times more than that of H1B visas relative the population pool of countries eligible for H1B at 0.12% versus 0,004%.

(The break up of number of TN issued to Canada and Mexico are approximate but total is based on Bureau of Consular Affairs.)

So what does this all mean?  Not sure because I was expecting number of TN issued to be much higher given the strong business ties with the US economy, cultural similarity (Canadians), and geographic promixity to the US.

Now that the economy is picking up, maybe this will change.