How cities attract and retain hard‐won foreign talent in times of economic crisis is an under‐researched theme. This paper draws on surveys of firms and allied professionals in the Vancouver biotechnology sector to examine the strategies used to attract and retain highly skilled staff over a 10‐year period up to 2012. It argues that the foreign highly skilled within Vancouver's biotechnology sector were more prone to crisis at the level of the firm than they were directly vulnerable to the global financial recession of the early 2000s and 2008. In fact, these crises required firms interviewed to become highly dependent on local and regional auxiliary professionals such as human resource managers and professional immigration attorneys, in addition to spouses, in order to retain these highly skilled foreign professionals within the host city of Vancouver. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.