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An Anonymous Coward writes:

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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