This Texas School District Wants 23 Foreign Teachers To Leave The Country

by Esther Yu-Hsi Lee

It only takes two unscrupulous school district administrators to unravel the lives of nearly two dozen teachers in a Texas surburb. When administrators recruited foreign teachers from the Philippines, Mexico, Colombia, and other countries to accommodate the growing Latino population in a Dallas suburb, they allegedly promised to help secure permanent residency for teachers. Instead those teachers, the majority of whom have worked for years at the Garland Independent School District (GISD), are now facing deportation.
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Over the past decade, the GISD filed 642 H1-B work visa applications to fill bilingual teaching positions, even though “similarly sized Dallas schools were recruiting 17 to 23 foreign teachers annually,” according to a CBS Dallas-Fort Worth affiliate.
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The H1-B visa is a “non-immigrant visa” that does not provide a pathway to securing legal permanent residency and maxes out after six years. Organizations can sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency however. Twenty-three teachers alleged that the GISD made that promise and even accepted fees to do so. The school never followed through with sponsorship and has maintained the actions of a few school district officials do not speak for the school itself.
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During a press conference Tuesday, Harry Jones, GISD’s law representative, said that a Human Resources administrator had exploited the H1-B program in order to line his own wallet.

Xenophobic Lunacy