Trump’s deportation push: Immigrant teachers fear job loss

Washington DC: Nearly 10 per cent of teachers in the US, who are immigrants, are facing the threat of the Donald Trump administration’s push for deportation, even though the US is looking overseas to fill teacher shortages, a report by Al Jazeera suggested.

A certain number of migrant teachers are already facing deportation threats as their application to renew their work permit was denied. This is when many of them are asylum applicants who had fled their home countries, which were under crises related to violence.

Those who lost their work permit in the US are supposed to stop working immediately.

One of the sources of Al Jazeera, who is an immigrant who denied work permit renewal, told the news agency that the person stops working as a teacher risks traumatizing their students since the person was teaching at a pre-school.

According to estimates from 2019, there are 857,200 immigrant teachers in the US among the country’s 8.1 million teachers, who teach or give lectures from pre-school to universities there. The US government brought 6,716 full-time teachers to the country in the 2023-24 year alone. Most of them are from countries like Jamaica, Spain, and Colombia.

The trump administration’s deportation reform has proven disruptive to schools that mostly rely on foreign-born teachers, Al Jazeera writes. The push to rescind legal pathways to immigration has jeopardized the employment of several faculty members, according to the news agency.

After the Trump administration ended TPS status for more than 3,50,000 Venezuelan citizens, including many teachers, and their authorization to work legally in the US is going to expire in 2026. Thus, many schools are going to fall short of educators with expertise in languages like Spanish, French, and Mandarin.