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posted by Fnord666 on Friday June 21 2019, @02:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-visa-for-master-card-data dept.

The US is looking to cap the number of H-1B visas granted to India due to recently enacted "data localization" laws.

India, which has upset firms such as Mastercard and irked the U.S. government with stringent new rules on data storage, is the largest recipient of these temporary visas, most of them to workers at big Indian technology firms. India receives about 70% of all US H-1B visas, but would be limited to between 10% and 15% of the annual quota.

[...]Most affected by any such caps would be India’s more than $150 billion IT sector, including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys Ltd, which uses H-1B visas to fly engineers and developers to service clients in the United States, its biggest market. Major Silicon Valley tech companies also hire workers using the visas.

Shares in Indian IT firms fell in early trade on Thursday after the Reuters story. Wipro Ltd fell around 4%, while Infosys and TCS fell more than 2% each. The broader Nifty IT index’s 1.8% fall was its biggest intraday percentage decline in over five weeks.

Also at: Fortune, The Economic Times (India), and MSN.


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  • (Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday June 21 2019, @09:28PM

    by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Friday June 21 2019, @09:28PM (#858666)

    I don't think its entirely unreasonable for countries to want localized data.

    A company like Visa probably has a cost reduction incentive to keep their data in as few places as possible. Fewer, larger deployments that are more geographically close to each other is probably cheaper and easier to manage than more smaller deployments spread out over a larger area. Local companies in the more remote regions may be able to compete more effectively as a result too, by keeping their own setups lean (they have less overhead and less compliance people sniffing around).

    Companies like Visa have a lot money, which is a lot of political power, so they can pressure the administration to agree with their aims. Visa et all need to nip this localization thing in the bud to keep data localization (ie. higher operating costs) from becoming the norm.

    Government wise, the government of course wants as much international data stored locally as possible, to make CIA/NSA/FBI investigations easier. It is easier to halt flow of foreign money when you want to mess with someone if the path the money takes is the next door over versus the far side of the planet.

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