School districts across the country are quietly embracing a hiring practice that would be unthinkable in almost any other profession: importing foreign labor to undercut wages, all while insisting they’re doing it out of necessity. The Trump administration’s tightening of visa rules is now threatening that arrangement, and the reaction from education bureaucracies tells you everything you need to know about how dependent they’ve become on suppressing labor costs rather than fixing the real problem.
Take rural North Carolina as a case study. In Halifax County, international teachers now make up the majority of the teaching workforce — 109 out of 156 educators across 11 schools. Seventy-five of them are on H-1B visas, with the rest holding J-1 visas. Nationwide, some 3,600 foreign teachers have been hired under similar programs. The justification is always the same: American teachers don’t want the jobs because the pay is too low.
How Taxpayers Subsidize H-1B Labor pic.twitter.com/TtAu0tJ3oq
— Cowtown Caller (@CowtownCaller) January 13, 2026
That explanation skips an important step. American teachers don’t want the jobs because school districts refuse to pay professional wages. Instead of addressing that failure, districts import teachers who will accept lower compensation, fewer benefits, and less leverage. When a foreign teacher says, “We’re not taking jobs from locals,” that may feel sincere, but it ignores basic economics. If the job paid competitively, an American teacher would take it. The only reason there’s a “gap” is because districts have engineered one.
This isn’t just a theoretical concern. As Dallas Express reporter Kellen Jones recently explained, H-1B policies directly shape local labor markets. They affect who gets hired, who gets laid off, and what wages look like — all while taxpayers foot the bill. Schools, Jones argues, may be the single biggest subsidy machine in the H-1B ecosystem because education funding represents a direct transfer of taxpayer dollars to imported labor.
Dallas ISD alone hired roughly 1,200 H-1B workers over the past five years, many in bilingual education. That means legal foreign workers are being brought in to teach the children of illegal aliens who don’t speak English — a situation that perfectly captures how distorted the system has become. Instead of asking why immigration policy has overwhelmed schools in the first place, districts treat imported labor as the default solution.
Meanwhile, the excuse that there’s “no money” to pay teachers collapses under scrutiny. Administrative bloat has exploded. Between 2000 and 2019, the number of school administrators grew nearly 88 percent, while teaching positions grew less than 9 percent and student enrollment barely moved. In Washington state, spending on administrators rose 54 percent, compared to just 25 percent for teachers. Nationwide, non-teaching staff spending has ballooned even faster.
The problem isn’t a teacher shortage. It’s a priorities shortage.
The solution is neither complicated nor radical. Stop padding central offices with do-nothing administrators. Redirect that money into teacher salaries. Make teaching a profession Americans can afford to stay in. And then stop importing foreign labor at cut-rate wages to paper over a system that’s been mismanaged for decades.
