School District's Use of Worker Visa Program Draws Scrutiny
Texas District Allegedly Exploited H-1B Program in Recruiting Teachers From Overseas.
From left, Alfonso Casares Tafur, Elizabeth Niño de Rivera and Francisco Javier Marcano were hired with H-1B visas. They are now advocating for the Garland, Texas, school district to help them stay in the U.S.Cooper Neill for The Wall Street Journal
GARLAND, Texas—As this city outside Dallas turned heavily Hispanic over the past decade, its school district hired foreign teachers like Bernardo Montes-Rodríguez, a Colombian, with the promise of a green card.
Now Mr. Montes and dozens of other teachers are uncertain whether they will be able to permanently settle in the U.S., as federal agencies investigate the Garland Independent School District for allegedly exploiting the worker visa program under which they were recruited.
Widely known as a way to bring in tech workers, the H-1B visa program allows employers to hire skilled foreigners for hard-to-fill positionsfrom software engineer to science teacher. And school districts around the country have used them to hire thousands of foreign teachers.
But the Texas case is the latest example in a string of alleged misuses of the program in schools. Since 2001, the U.S. Department of Labor has found more than 2,000 H-1B violations by individual schools, districts or boards, agency records show. In contrast, in a single-tech company category—custom computer programming—there were about 4,300 violations in roughly the same period. The tech sector traditionally accounts for the biggest number of workers brought in under the program.
In Garland, a city of about 234,000 people, school administrators investigating the matter said in April they discovered that foreign recruits had been hired not to increase the ranks of Spanish-speaking teachers, as intended, but instead, they allege, to enrich a rogue district executive and his associates, who charged immigrants hefty fees for legal and other services.
In a sign the program was being misused, officials say, the district hired teachers through a recruitment firm in the Philippines, where Spanish isn't the official language. They paid $1,000 for an interview with the district's head of human resources, Victor Leos, and $5,000 if they were hired, the district said. Mr. Leos, who retired from the School District's Use of Worker Visa Program Draws Scrutiny - WSJ: