In every corner of the United States, school districts struggle with teacher shortages. Many districts have responded to the problem, in part, by successfully hiring teachers from as close as Canada and Mexico and as far away as the Philippines, Jamaica, and India. International teachers have filled hard-to-staff positions in low-income, rural, and urban classrooms—most notably in math, science, and special education. Public school leaders say the teachers from abroad are meeting a critical need because not enough American teachers are applying to teach in U.S. public schools.
Nonetheless, a new $100,000 federal visa fee is threatening international teacher recruitment. More broadly, the fee calls attention to the inadequacies and misguided direction of the nation’s immigration policies, including the ones that directly affect schools.
As of late September 2025, all employers must pay the federal government $100,000 for every new H-1B visa, one of the two main visa types that permit teachers from abroad to work in United States schools. Previously, employers paid a maximum filing fee of $5,000 per H-1B visa, and smaller employers paid as little as $2,000. A White House executive order stratospherically increased that fee with the stated goal of restricting entry of nonimmigrant workers, especially in information technology, thereby opening jobs to Americans.
Maybe tech companies will pay $100,000 fees, but public schools cannot. While the number of teachers from abroad is small in relation to the nation’s teacher workforce, international teachers are concentrated in high-need areas and subjects. Without access to H-1B visas, schools will seek other ways of hiring internationally. As someone who has studied teacher labor migration for two decades, I am certain that the new fee will not reduce international teacher recruitment, but it will create more instability in our public schools by forcing them to rely on shorter-term visas not designed for labor-shortage solutions—and this will increase teacher turnover.
Currently, international teachers are brought into the country on either labor-shortage H-1B visas for skilled workers in specialty occupations or J-1 visas that aim to promote international cultural exchange. Neither works particularly well for schools, but the H-1B offers schools more staffing stability than the J-1. The H-1B, which covers professionals in not only STEM and education fields but finance and law, allows for six years of work and provides a pathway to residency. The J-1 visa allows for only three years in the United States.
The H-1B visa has long meant complications for schools. Congressional caps limit annual H-1B numbers, and generally a lottery has determined which requests will be granted. And even when an H-1B application is successful in the lottery, its Oct. 1 start date is incompatible with the school year. Finally, under the new rules, success for teachers in the lottery will be even more difficult because of a weighting system that will prioritize candidates for higher-paid jobs.
The inherent uncertainty of the H-1B visa, even before the $100,000 price tag, caused many schools to prefer to hire with J-1 visas. J-1s are readily available with flexible timing that allows alignment with the school year. But the visa’s three-year limit contributes to teacher turnover and school workforce instability.
The new fee will not reduce international teacher recruitment, but it will create more instability in our public schools ... .
Visas that contribute to teacher turnover are a problem. High rates of turnover negatively affect student achievement, and they are costly to schools. Drawing on longitudinal school data, researchers Jennifer Holme and Huriya Jabbar show the ways that chronic and cumulative staffing instability erode school culture and undermine school improvement efforts with concerning implications for student achievement.
Given the costs of teacher turnover and the shortcomings of existing visas, how should the nation draw on the international teacher labor market to meet its K-12 needs? The Trump administration, in the midst of escalating an anti-immigration crusade, seems little interested in the question. It prefers de-incentivizing hiring abroad. The H-1B visa surcharge is based on the premise that increasing employer visa costs will reduce international recruitment, expand domestic hiring, and drive up wages.
While it is true that increasing teacher wages has proved to increase domestic teacher supply, it is less clear where the funding to do so would come from given the Trump administration’s trajectory of reduced education spending and rising costs for school districts. In the meantime, the new H-1B fees are likely to increase reliance on the three-year-max J-1 visa, destabilizing school staffing and creating precarity for the teachers and their students.
Teachers working on short-term visas are easily exploited because of the uncertainty of their immigration status. International teachers have faced everything from pressure to work beyond contracted hours and denial of access to professional development to usurious lending and human trafficking. Even without egregious exploitation, the situation of teachers in a relatively short-term placement, who often cannot bring their families, impedes community integration and threatens their ability to be the best possible teacher for their students.
AASA (the school superintendents association) and the National School Attorneys Association are pressing for changes that would ease the burden on districts filing for the H-1B visa. But as a nation, we need to do more. We need to ensure that teachers recruited internationally have a pathway to permanence in our schools and nation.
School leaders, especially those with experience of international teachers, should be at the forefront of a movement urging establishment of a visa that transplants teachers rather than creates a transient flow. A teacher visa that promotes staffing stability will need to be affordable, compatible with the public school calendar, and offer terms that prioritize longer-term school placements and pathways to permanent residency.
Recruiting and retaining good teachers, wherever their origin, benefits U.S. public schools and the students they serve. Current anti-immigrant policies—including the H-1B visa fees—deny our nation, schools, and children access to qualified and committed teachers. Short-term labor visas are a problem for schools but not a problem solved by reducing access to teachers who want to work in some of our highest-needs schools.
A global revolving door of guest-worker teachers in and out of low-income schools and back and forth between nations denies us the full benefits of teacher labor migration. Making it cost prohibitive to recruit qualified teachers or sending effective and established teachers away is counterproductive to meeting the achievement and equity goals of public education.
