[JPKab]

I'm not disagreeing with you on your comment at all, but the "much demonized H1 process" was legitimately abused by a lot of bad actors who violated the spirit of the visa (talent you can't find in US) in pursuit of simply using it to hire at a lower rate a captive employee who you can freely exploit.

I was at a company that abused it, and we were hiring DBAs whose entire job was to administer MS SQL server. There were plenty of people locally who could do this, but none who were willing to work 70 hours a week for the very average salary.

The US government wasn't even sharing any data on the visas publicly until the Trump administration forced them. Once the data was public, it was blatantly obvious as to why they hadn't shared the data before. Wipro, Cognizant, etc were hogging the H1Bs for labor arbitrage purposes, making it hard for people looking for actual rare talent to get anyone in country. I had a friend from Pune who was stuck waiting in India for 2 years (an amazingly talented ML engineer) due to us not being able to get him a visa while Wipro was stealing them all in the same region for their labor arbitrage business.