I have always needed to pay my foreign employees the same or often more than the American programmers. Usually I could not find American programmers at all.
But there are lots of quality control employees and lab workers who work for very little. There are a few Indian companies that seem to control most of the H1-B visas and they pay very little for their employees. They have driven down the rates for those types of workers.
Perhaps you should ding your HR recruiter for being too strict with the job description or the ‘requirements’.
I have developed many cool programs during my career even though I don’t have the creditials. Programming is easy, and coding is merely syntax.
I chose Finance as a career because everyone knows that IT programmers get terminated as soon as a company decides on a different software platform.