Fact Sheet: Migrant Teachers

Importing Educators
• More than 19,000 migrant teachers are working in the United States on temporary visas - and the number is growing.

• Many of these migrant teachers have been victims of widespread abuse by recruiters and others.

• For-profit recruiting firms and practices are almost entirely unregulated.

• The full AFT report – "Importing Educators – Causes and Consequences of International Teacher Recruitment" – is available online.

Recommended Reforms
• Adopt and enforce ethical standards for the international recruitment of teachers.

• Currently there are no standards at all to govern practices for recruiting teachers from abroad to placements in U.S. public schools.

• Improve and expand access to government data that is necessary to track and study international hiring trends in education.

• Implement better mentoring and orientation programs for migrant teachers who often face stressful challenges of communication and classroom management.

• Cooperate on an international level to protect migrant workers and to mitigate any negative impact of teacher migration on the school systems of the sending countries.

• Renew the commitment to make hard-to-staff U.S. schools more desirable places to teach and learn.

The Numbers
• The number of overseas-trained teachers being hired in the United States is increasing steadily, with the current nationwide total at more than 19,000.

• In 2009, these were the top 10 states in terms of the number of employer applications for hiring foreign teachers:

• Texas – 4,424

• New York –1,850

• California – 833

• Maryland – 828

• Louisiana – 694

• Georgia – 564

• Florida – 277

• N. Carolina – 261

• Virginia –188

• District of Columbia –170

Research from the American Federation of Teachers