Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wants state lawmakers to write a flat rule into law: no employee of a Texas public school may hold an H-1B work visa, ever. He unveiled the demand at an Aug. 18 campaign-season event in Austin, framing it as one front in a larger fight against what he calls outside interference in the classroom. Fewer than 350 teachers and staff statewide currently hold the visa, but the handful of districts that lean on it most heavily — Dallas, Houston, and the Houston suburb of Alief — also serve some of the largest shares of Latino students anywhere in the state, which pulls a fairly obscure federal-visa dispute into schools built around working-class Latino families.
