The lack is established by a good faith recruitment process, not an exhaustive search. This is intentionally vague because it's a non-sensical requirement that is hard to prove one way or the other and was only added as a political compromise. The company is free to tailor the minimum requirements to its liking. Recall that this is a free capitalistic country. So you can establish that you can't fill the req. locally and hence are hiring a foreigner. The reason I'm pointing this out is because you have picked some type of textual or literal interpretation of things ("this is what EB is for"), and companies have lawyers who are good at following the text.