My wife works for a large tech company in San Francisco. There’s someone on her team that they are sponsoring an H1B visa for, and apparently one of the requirements for that is that they need to try to fill the position with a citizen/resident if possible. So they had an officially-open position with HR and she has personally interviewed candidates that legitimately thought they might get the job but she had to find reasons to reject them so the company could say “we tried to find someone local to hire but we were unable to find someone good enough, please approve the H1B”. This was during the pandemic work-from-home so I personally overheard these interviews. It’s amazing to me that this actually happens and isn’t just some crazy conspiracy theory. I have no idea how widespread it is but this is a major company, not some random sketchy startup.