Yeah, I don't doubt it. There are so many abuses of government programs. The government absolutely sucks at administering things at best, at worst they have dark intentions.

FWIW I can attest to this as a former hiring manager in the US for an international mid-size company. What was (and I'd guess still is, looking at the stats) happening was that the large consultancy firms would get cheap labor from overseas under H1B because the commercial rate of a junior consultant (aka someone that doesn't know anything but has great education) in the US was/is 20x-50x that of someone in South Asia or Eastern Europe. So if you give them a 5x raise you'd make 4x more money from letting the person talk to the customer from the US instead of their home country.

We mostly needed to get experienced engineers (to make field service more robust, because it was hard to get people with proper experience in the US) over from Western/Central Europe, and we were often not getting H1B allocations - these would go to Accenture & co instead - when we needed them, so instead we'd get people to Canada where there was no upper limit for experienced engineers, and only managers (including me) were under L1 in the US. Then at least, if field support was in need in the US, at least they were relatively close, rather than having to subject them to 8-12 hour flight plans.