Abbott wants to ban H-1B visa workers in Texas schools — The Hill

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has proposed banning the state’s public schools from hiring workers with H-1B visas. The initiative, which he voiced during his election campaign, could apply to both new employees and teachers already working in schools, according to the authors of the column.

As Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael Hansen and Laura Bartlett, chair of the Education Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, write in a column for The Hill, in 2025 Texas received the highest number of H-1B visa approvals in the United States for K–12 school education workers.

The column authors’ arguments

According to the data cited by the authors, foreign teachers have become an important way to fill vacancies in schools with the greatest staffing needs. The share of foreign-educated teachers among STEM staff at such schools rose from 1% in 1993 to more than 6% in 2020.

They most often teach mathematics, science, special education, and foreign languages in high-poverty urban and rural schools. In the authors’ study, 79% of foreign-educated teachers had a degree in a STEM field, compared with 68% of their colleagues educated in the United States.

More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.

Possible consequences of the ban

Hansen and Bartlett believe that the ban could increase schools’ reliance on teachers working outside their field, long-term substitutes, and employees without formal training. They note that in the 2023–2024 school year, more than half of new teachers in Texas began working without certification.

Abbott explained the proposal by citing concerns about possible “foreign influence,” referring, among other things, to a Qatar-supported Arabic language teaching program and China-supported Mandarin language instruction. The column authors note that the ban would also affect certified teachers from the Philippines and Mexico, while demand for international educators could shift to shorter-term J-1 visas.

In the authors’ view, rather than completely abandoning teachers on H-1B visas, authorities should strengthen the training of local personnel, raise teachers’ pay, and improve working conditions in schools that lack staff.