Denver: Immigrant Teachers Threatened With Deportation if They Join Strikes

By Mike Elk and Christine Bolaños, Guardian UK

20 February 19

Denver public school system sent teachers letters warning if they went went on strike, their visas could be jeopardized

mmigrant educators are being threatened with deportation if they attempt to join the wave of teachers’ strikes hitting the US.

In an attempt to dissuade its recent strike, the Denver public school system sent letters to teachers in January warning immigrant teachers that if they went on strike, their visas could be jeopardized.

Since many types of visas require that workers be employed in order to stay in the country, the district warned that participating in the strike could jeopardize how the federal government views their work status.

“In the event that you have teachers who have H or J visas [two types of visas for foreign students and teachers and foreign workers] and that choose to strike, they are allowed to do so, but we need to be informed as soon as possible so that we can report that to immigration and the US Department of State. If they have a pending case and they choose to strike, this could impact the decision on the case,” wrote Taylor Tanick, a human resources professional, in a letter to teachers in the school district obtained by the Guardian.

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.

The Denver school district later apologized for the letter. Union officials said that under federal law, workers on visas who choose to engage in strikes with their co-workers are protected from deportation. However, the damage was already done.

“It resulted in a wave of fear that had a particularly chilling effect on our teachers,” said Denver Classroom Teachers Association president Henry Roman, an immigrant from Peru. “This is just a scare tactic to intimidate our immigrant educators.”

Many immigrant teachers say that a combination of fear and lack of understanding of US labor rights kept some immigrant teachers from participating in teachers’ unions.

Karen Reyes is a special education teacher in the Austin independent school district, who came to the US undocumented from Mexico when she was two years old. In 2012, she became eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which allowed children brought to the US under the age of 16 before 2007 to legally go to college and obtain teaching degrees.

Prior to joining Education Austin, Reyes had not been involved in the labor movement and didn’t feel comfortable enough as an immigrant to speak out.

However, following a series of high profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids in Austin in the winter of 2017, Reyes said she found herself wrestling with whether to share with concerned immigrant parents that she, too, was at risk of deportation if Daca was rescinded. Around this same time, she got involved in her union.

While she hasn’t personally experienced overt intimidation over her immigration status, she said that she knows of other immigrant teachers who have and who are consequently scared of getting involved.

“I feel like they’re trying to silence folks, and while it has not explicitly happened to me, if you’re in a community that is under attack our biggest fear is for us or someone close to us to be deported,” Reyes said. “It adds huge unnecessary stress and it makes you feel like you can’t speak out about issues that impact you, your students and their families.”

While the Trump administration has faced legal controversy for deporting activists on Daca like Reyes, the Austin educator says that she wants to speak out to inspire others.

“I want to empower those who are too afraid to speak up,” she said. “That’s how change happens. We’re little snowflakes individually but together we can cause an avalanche.”

This is not the first time that veiled threats have been made against the graduate workers on foreign visas who fill tens of thousands of campus jobs.

In 2017, when workers were seeking to unionize with SEIU, the administration at Missouri’s Washington University in St Louis sent out an email with an FAQ link that hinted that participating in a strike could result in visa suspensions during work stoppages and announced it would be required to report to the government any students who failed to maintain their status.

“The way they intimidated people was by saying the union could make you go on strike at any time and if you go on strike, they may have to report you to Ice,” said Augusto “Gus” Medeiros. Medeiros is a Brazilian immigrant and graduate worker within the department of physics at Washington University, who now serves as chair of the Washington University Graduate Workers Union’s action committee.

Despite the threats, the union drive ultimately was successful and workers were able to win subsidized dental care – something that had been requested for years, and 11 months pay instead of 10 months out of the year.

“It really showed us that coming together across campus works, and that was the real springboard to get us to push for larger scale change, like our current campaign for a campus-wide $15-an-hour minimum wage and free childcare,” Madeiros said.