Immigrant Teachers Face Intimidation As Strike Wave Spreads

AFT members protest against a union busting bill at the Texas State Legislature (Dallas Morning News)

Writing for the Guardian, Christine Bolaños and Mike Elk have a look at the intimidation faced by immigrant teachers:

According to an analysis by the Guardian, more than 13,000 teachers were recruited from overseas on J-1 cultural visas during the last five years alone as a result of local shortages. According to the federal government, more than 18,000 educators teach on H-1B visas.

In Texas, Missouri and elsewhere, immigrant teachers say that they have faced a culture of intimidation that has prevented many from speaking out.

“Things like that happen all the time,” says Lily Eskelsen García, the first Latina president of the National Education Association. “And it’s reprehensible. That’s not good faith bargaining – that is an intimidation tactic.”

“What we know is that some people have been oppressing the system for a long time and don’t like the power of educators standing up and being heard and that they will try to intimidate us,” said García.

For more, go to the Guardian.

About the Author

Mike Elk
Mike Elk is an Emmy-nominated labor reporter who covered everything from Lula & the Brazilian labor movement to major league baseball. He spent years covering union organizing in the South for The Guardian and was labeled by the New York Times as an "abrasive gadfly" for exposing within the labor movement. Raised in a UE union family in Pittsburgh, Elk was illegally for union organizing at Politico in 2015 and used his NLRB settlement to start the crowd-funded Payday Report. He lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh and is fluent in both Pittsburghese and Portuguese, which he learned when attending journalism school at PUC-Rio de Janerio. Email: [email protected]

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