Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

You have to consider two things in addendum to that:

- Those $0.20/hr jobs come with major financial burdens. Firstly, you now have to organize your supply chain around it as a labor base. That means your logistics are now many orders of magnitude more complex, and more expensive. On top of that, you have additional overhead because you're doing business across international lines, which raises organizational headcount and the kind of bright minds it takes to do that don't come cheap. Quite a lot of money is dumped into making maritime shipping cheap. It's not just subsidies and tax incentives applied to the maintenance and operation of container ships where even the fuel is a tax write-off and heavily subsidized. You need to also consider how much do those ports cost to operate? How much does it cost to maintain shipping lanes? Government attention, influence and dollars are spent at every single step of the way to ensure that foreign labor forces are affordable. A very, very large amount. It becomes apparent when you realize the end to end cost of building a cargo ship, loading it to the brim, and sailing it across the pacific is less than a nice house in Manhattan.

- The disparity in labor cost is also primarily driven by policy which exploits the 'decoupled' nature of local economies driving different costs of living. While this is traditionally framed as only working within the context of underindustrialized people being exploited, you can compare the cost of living in Taiwan with the US, as well as the relative prosperity of the two nations. Large picture, broad spectrum economic comparison is a bad joke because it's simply too lossy to support logical inference, but it's not a mistake that the dollar goes quite far in other places. The inflation of the US dollar was intentionally positioned as the oscillating circuit of the global economy, this way the US would be able to deflate it's currency to prevent bad exchange favorability when needed without suffering long-term economic damage like what happened to Britain in the 1920s.

It's a system of pulleys and levers which were carefully put together to make means to an end. It's not actually cheaper, think about it in a thermodynamic sense. It just looks cheaper because it was structured that way. Costs are hidden by opaque mechanisms that exist in plain sight, all at such a grand scale you can hardly conceive its orchestration. It works because men with a lot of power want it to.

Personal anecdote: I hired an exceptional H-1B worker to a role while I worked in SF, but was legally required to first advertise their role in 2 places. We put it in a 2am TV spot and a Modesto newspaper ad. But the whole thing was a legally required farce. We already knew from months of aggressive sourcing that no other qualified candidates existed - in fact we were over the moon to hire this person.

the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.

Why? If you know as much as you claim about immigration you should know that any EB1 application will dwarf any EB2 application in amount of work and documentation needed. Also, having rare skillset is not enough to get EB1, as you also might know. You need to meet a set of requirements, none of if which has anything to do with rarity of the skillset.

> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.

Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax

> You may be eligible for an employment-based, second preference visa if you are a member of the professions holding an advanced degree or its equivalent, or a person who has exceptional ability.

And you’re concerned about gaming the system? And you’re also claiming that EB system was designed to work for exactly the scenario that you fit?