At two companies I’ve worked at we’ve wanted to hire someone in Canada who would be working remotely and the person was forced to relocate to the US for the job.
As I understand it (and with the caveat that I am not an expert; just someone who has needed to learn a few things because of their job requirements):
- The US doesn’t care where US citizens live and/or work, as long as they file US tax reteurns.
- Pandemic border closures aside, Canada doesn’t care about US citizens living/working in Canada as long as they aren’t doing “Canadian work”, and as long as they set foot outside Canada at least once every 6 months. (However, such people would be ineligible for medicare unless they have some other status in Canada, like permanent residency or a work permit, and you can’t currently buy residential property in Canada unless you have status there.)
- Many (most?) US employers have HR policies that require employees to live/work from within the US due to reduce the complexities of tax and benefit rules. Folks working as contractors / on a self-employed basis presumably wouldn’t be so restricted. Folks employed by companies with operations on both sides of the border may have other options.
My company considers Puerto Rico residents to be “non-US” for hiring purposes, I looked into it once for a potential candidate. Canada is definitely out for us, although they did allow me to take my work computer there when I was doing actuarial grading (the policy is that company issues laptops can’t be taking outside of the country, but Canada is the exception as long as I was not doing company work while there).
Wtf
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Don’t get me started about international borders vs corporate data policies.
It’s not something my company handles all that well.
I’ve worked for 1 company remotely that let me work from any country i wanted to live in.
The other 2 companies where i’ve had a remote position required me to be in the US full-time but i could go for a week or 2 to other countries. One of them required me to tell IT where i was going to be and where I’d be logging in from.
I have other friends that work remotely where they’re not even allowed to check email from a foreign country.
None of the companies I’ve worked at have been publicly traded or very large. I think that probably has a lot to do with how liberal they’ve been with my travel.