Midland ISD Moves to Recruit Foreign Workers as Teachers

Colony Ridge is a massive immigrant housing development in Liberty County, a formerly sleepy rural county north of Houston. The development has strained the school district there with new non-English-speaking pupils. But Colony Ridge may be the only rural, if formerly rural, school district that is growing rapidly. Cleveland ISD, which serves the Colony Ridge development, grew from 3,000 students in 2013 to over 10,000 students this year, according to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. [source] Midland ISD's student enrollment was 26,432 during the 2019-2020 school year. It grew modestly to 28,649 pupils in the 2023-2024 school year. [source]

Midland ISD Trustee Brandon Hodges wasn't buying that there was a crisis of a shortage of French nationals as French language teachers. He hinted at the shortage of bilingual teachers to tackle a growing number of Spanish-speaking students. But no one wanted to say that out loud.

Reyes couched the need for foreign nationals to teach special education, math, science, and (what he really needs) bilingual teachers.

Trustee Hodges asked questions about the incentives to the district to hire foreign workers over U.S. citizens because of the cost savings. He also noted that the biggest barrier to teacher recruitment was the district’s student discipline challenges. He asked aloud if the visa program would paper over these discipline issues without real solutions otherwise.

The cost savings of hiring foreign workers as teachers were exposed at the meeting. Reyes noted that the district would not be required to contribute to the employer's portion of FICA taxes, for example. That is an immediate savings of 7.65% of that worker's pay.

The Department for Professional Employees, a part of the AFL-CIO, which is a traditional Democrat-controlled union, noted that significant abuses to workers occur under the U.S. State Department's J-1 Exchange Visitor Teacher Program, which Midland ISD will operate its foreign worker teacher program under. Of course, the AFL-CIO is incentivized to demote foreign worker visa programs in favor of protecting U.S. citizen jobs. However, these abuses were not discussed at the school board meeting.

The AFL-CIO noted that the J-1 teacher visa work program is managed by the State Department and unregulated by the Department of Labor. It claimed that many of the foreign workers participating are charged as much as $15,000 each by placement companies as "recruitment fees." [source]

This begs the question. Since Midland ISD initially said it will hire 40 foreign workers who will pay a staffing agency thousands of dollars to place them, and Midland ISD will pay a staffing agency to hire them, are teaching jobs with excellent benefits really that unwanted by U.S. citizens? And, is paying tens of thousands to recruit each foreign teacher a misallocation of resources?