> and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to the US.

In my opinion this is even more general: there's a culture of focusing on punishment in the USA that creates more issues than the abuse it tries to punish.

It's one of the reasons of much of the bureaucratic mess in many systems, like healthcare and social welfare, an eternal game of whack-a-mole to stamp out abuse/fraud that creates Kafka-esque results. The focus is to find, and punish as much abuse as possible through increased requirements, increased bureaucratic burden, so on and so forth, instead of iterating the design in more clever ways to diminish the downsides.

I don't think there should be resignation to fraud and abuse, at the same time it doesn't matter how much more complicated the process gets it will always suffer from fraud/abuse, this extreme focus on trying to stamp it all out, punish, etc. instead of searching for a good balance where it's the most net-positive without creating additional issues, becomes very counter-productive after a certain level. Punishment of all waste, abuse, fraud is an impossible goal but it's always a political need given how American society needs to feel it's possible and will be done.

It's quite a cultural quagmire.

This is by design by replubicans so that they can claim government doesn't work, or so that they ca kneecap programs before becoming successful and permanent.

Look at their plan to 'starve the beast'. They claim they are for fiscal responsibility as their number one priority, but they would rather bankrupt the country in order to get their political way than be fiscally responsible. They have zero morals. It's hard to have a working government when half the people in charge don't want a working government.