The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) employs hundreds of foreign workers as teachers through the H-1B visa program despite a surplus of unemployed teachers in North Texas’s job market.
According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ H-1B Employer Data Hub, DISD employed 235 H-1 B workers in fiscal year 2024.
The H-1B Salary Database for 2024 reveals that approximately half of the applications filed for H-1B visas by DISD this year were for “elementary bilingual education” teachers, while the remainder were for an administrator and a combination of special ed, math, and science teachers.
Most H-1B visa applications from the district show that foreign teachers typically receive a salary of nearly $62,000. Only around 30 visa applications showed wages above $75,oo0, with the highest compensation, $86,000, going to the administrator job marked “Business Analyst.”
This reporting of H-1B applications comes as numerous North Texas districts, including Irving, Plano, Fort Worth, and Arlington, have experienced layoffs, and some districts, like Richardson, have even closed schools, KERA reported.
According to the Texas Education Agency, the attrition rate among teachers nationwide between 2023 and 2024 was 12.2%.
“The H-1B program allows employers in the United States to temporarily employ foreign workers in occupations that require the theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher in the specific specialty, or its equivalent,” the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website stated.
The Department of Labor indicates that the H-1B program is intended to allow employers to fill gaps where they cannot find native-born American workers with a specialized skill set. “The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States,” the government agency noted.
Around 85,000 H-1B visas are issued annually and last for 6 years of employment.
This revelation comes amid a national debate around the continuation of the H-1B visa program.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” President-elect Donald Trump’s adviser Vivek Ramaswamy posted on X during an online firestorm over H-1B visas in the next administration. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
Critics of the program claim to have been de-badged and demonetized after criticizing Elon Musk, also an H-1B advocate, over his support of the program on his social media platform X, The Dallas Express reported.
Trump was once an H-1B critic, assailing the program during his victorious 2016 presidential campaign.
“The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” then-candidate Trump said during his first presidential bid in 2016.
Trump, however, seems to have changed his tune.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he recently told the New York Post.
The Dallas Express asked the DISD Board of Trustees why their district has sought teachers from abroad when there appears to be a surplus of teachers in the Texas job market. DX contacted trustees Lance Currie (District 1), Sarah Weinberg (District 2), Dan Micciche (District 3), Camile D. White (District 4), Maxie Johnson (District 5), Joyce Foreman (District 6), Ben Mackey (District 7), Joe Carreón (District 8), and Ed Turner (District 9).
None of the trustees responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.