If it isn't prying, what are your skills?
Speaking out of my own experience, I run an engineering group, and it's ridiculously hard for me to find good people. We aren't biased against Americans (nor, and you may not like this, are we biased for them), and we take a lot of trouble to make sure that the compensation we offer is in line with (or higher than) the rest of the industry. But, honestly, it's pretty rare for a top-notch person at any level of skill ... even relatively junior ... to respond to our job postings or recruiter, and then it's even more rare for us to manage to hire them away from the dozens of other great offers they're getting.
When I talk to other hiring managers in the area, I hear the same thing over and over. Too many jobs chasing too few good (or even not-good-but-could-be-mentored) candidates.
Thus my curiosity about your skillset.
(As an aside, I want to say that we do hire H1-B candidates, and that it's a point of pride for me that we pay them fairly and in line with anyone else who would have that job. I don't want to use their immigration situation to wring every last dollar from them. I'd rather that they were happy, and kept working for me because they liked it or were learning something.)
