Live data from Hacker News

US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

reuters.com

21–30 of 102 posts

Re: US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

#21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. Yes, because it directly affects the business of large outsourcing companies. It also drops remittances, one of the largest sources of dollars for India. No, because for many decades, India has been trying to keep their smartest citizens to build their own country. Making local companies, serving at local hospitals, teaching at local schools and universities. They want their own Google, Microsoft, Sun Mic…

Help me understand the first part. Why do you need a US visa (well, THAT visa - I understand a 'fly over for a meeting' visiting visa) as an outsourcing company? What I mean is: How are the outsourcing companies affected by this?

Its a business visa to allow exchange of ideas quicker, better.

Imagine GE, a company with a pool of power electronics talent in the US, wants to build specialized power plants for the Indian market. They can't do it remotely from the US. They will fly their US employees to India to study the market, understand rules and constraints, design and consult local Indian teams. The US employees need to stay there for years to build those things.

All that requires India to give US citizens the visa to work for such a long time. And India does give that. Business visas in India are easy to get.

Reverse the roles and if an Indian company wants to use their own pool of talent to do business in the US, H-1b are the only ones available for long term business related work, which got totally distorted by politics over the years.

https://www.usa-corporate.com/start-us-company-non-resident/...

Re: US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

#22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. Yes, because it directly affects the business of large outsourcing companies. It also drops remittances, one of the largest sources of dollars for India. No, because for many decades, India has been trying to keep their smartest citizens to build their own country. Making local companies, serving at local hospitals, teaching at local schools and universities. They want their own Google, Microsoft, Sun Mic…

Putting arbitrary caps on visas isn't a great way to do this though. A lot of startups in India are founded & staffed by Indian folks who got their experience, capital and connections working in the US.

Tell that to Trump. He can't see a win-win when it stares at him.

Re: US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

#23
Instead of worrying about location of the servers, the real point should be which government should be in control of the data. Even if the data is located in India under US government pressure on a company, say for some investigation, the US would still be access the data; the companies can still sell the data to other US-based companies.

Or, is location being used metaphorically over here?

Re: US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

#24

Instead of worrying about location of the servers, the real point should be which government should be in control of the data. Even if the data is located in India under US government pressure on a company, say for some investigation, the US would still be access the data; the companies can still sell the data to other US-based companies. Or, is location being used metaphorically over here?

Perhaps. But you still have oversight and physical access. You could bug the servers. You could monitor their network and so on. Your courts could create orders against the data on your servers. Also it's very dangerous as we have seen to have all your citizen's data exposed as it could allow like a country to better socially engineer your public and determine outcomes of elections.

I would double down and say if you do that, I will ban all H1Bs from leaving the country. Let's see how Trump and Silicon Valley feels about that.

Re: US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

#26
post #5

if free flow of data across countries helps in privacy then HIPAA should not have rule that healthcare data of US citizens need not be stored only in US. Will USGOV relax that norm ? the Indian govt rules are about storing financial data within the country and not gmail data.

There's so much wrong with this.

HIPAA doesn't talk about US citizens or distinguish different types of records based on any properties of the people that those records cover. The words citizen do not appear in HIPAA or HITECH. HIPAA applies to any records by covered entities, which is what it discusses, regardless of who those records refer to.

There is no requirement in HIPAA that PII must be stored in the US. This is such basic info it's in the HIPAA FAQ from HHS https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/c.... Question 9 is unequivocal, you can store data outside of the US, but you need to think about any dangers or risks associated with this. Which is totally logical.

There are lots of reasons to have issues with the US. But not what you're talking about.

Re: US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

#27
post #24

Instead of worrying about location of the servers, the real point should be which government should be in control of the data. Even if the data is located in India under US government pressure on a company, say for some investigation, the US would still be access the data; the companies can still sell the data to other US-based companies. Or, is location being used metaphorically over here?

Perhaps. But you still have oversight and physical access. You could bug the servers. You could monitor their network and so on. Your courts could create orders against the data on your servers. Also it's very dangerous as we have seen to have all your citizen's data exposed as it could allow like a country to better socially engineer your public and determine outcomes of elections. I would double down and say if you…

> You could bug the servers. You could monitor their network and so ... determine outcomes of elections

This is again irrespective of the server's locations.

Re: US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

#28
post #10

As an Indian - good! This will help the local IT industry tremendously.

Its also good for the freelancing/gig economy. Now even big companies will be forced to look for outsourcing or remote hiring options as the talent pool starts leaving that country.

Re: US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

#29
Reason for storing financial data within the country is, because in India corruption rate is high and no.of tax paying citizens are very less.

Indeed it is important for us to store financial data within the country to stop non tax abiding citizens.

Money laundering is also a huge problem. Citizens were being educated, not to take cash in large amounts, for the same reason.

Even after demonetization, government was not able to get rid of black money.

Edit: grammar

Post reply on HN