Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday that he plans to address concerns about taxpayer-funded H-1B visa recipients across public schools and universities in Texas.
Abbott, speaking to Dallas radio host Mark Davis, said his office is collecting information from state institutions and hopes to roll out an “action plan” on the issue later this week. The news comes after emails, as first reported by Quorum Report over the weekend, showed Abbott’s office requesting information from the Texas A&M University System about workers employed under the H-1B visa program by close of business Monday.
“We want to make sure our communities are not having people come in and take jobs that Texans could easily fill,” Abbott told Davis. “I don’t see why we need any H-1B visa employees in our public schools in the state of Texas, but we’re going to find out.”
The H-1B visa program, created by the Immigration Act of 1990, was originally designed to enable employers to temporarily hire skilled foreign workers for specialty positions. The program is operated by the federal government and not the various states where applicants are approved to work. Since its inception, the number of applications approved annually has grown to more than 400,000, with the majority of those being renewals. The national origin of applicants is predominantly Indian, making up more than 70%, according to a study by Pew Research. China was the next highest percentage, accounting for 12%.
Asked about possible fraud with the program, the governor said that he had been “looking into it,” noting that it is a federal program so Texas has to determine what authority it has to act.
While no details have been released yet, Abbott also indicated Monday that Texas might ask the Trump administration to begin withdrawing visas from recipients sponsored by taxpayer-funded institutions.
“What I’m looking at is the extent to which Texas taxpayer dollars are being used to pay for any of these people, whether it be, candidly, in our public schools in the state of Texas, in our universities and colleges in the state of Texas, and some other angles that we’re looking at,” Abbott said.
The concern about both H-1B visa fraud in the private sector and the use of foreign visa workers in publicly-funded institutions has become a growing concern, with reporting from right-of-center outlets going viral on the issue.
In taxpayer-funded institutions, such as public schools and universities, millions of dollars have gone toward paying the sponsorship costs and other fees associated with H-1B visa recipients. Texas has typically employed more educational H-1B visa employees than any other state.
Texas A&M University’s flagship campus in College Station spent more than $3.25 million in taxpayer dollars since 2020 on H-1B workers, according to documents obtained by the Dallas Express. The flagship school currently employs 214 visa beneficiaries, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. That is roughly 2% of the total staff and faculty.
Of the top 100 employers in Texas using H-1B visas to fill their workforces, dozens are publicly-funded educational institutions. The Dallas Independent School District, for example, employs 230 visa workers, making it the fifteenth largest overall beneficiary of the program in Texas and the education institution with the most H-1B recipients, according to the USCIS. That number, however, represents less than 1% of the district’s overall workforce of more than 22,000.
Houston ISD, meanwhile, sponsors 51 visa recipients, making it the second-largest ISD beneficiary in the state.
On the higher education front, the University of Texas at Austin employs 169 workers on the visa, Texas Tech University reported employing 143 workers, and UT-Dallas has 73 workers on its payroll, which has cost more than $1 million in taxpayer funding since 2020, per the Dallas Express.
In many cases, the H-1B visas are used to import international teachers who can teach in an increasingly non-English educational environment. Dallas ISD explains that the district will sponsor visas specifically for “Elementary Bilingual (English/Spanish) and Special Education teachers.” As of 2025, the district noted that over 50% of Dallas ISD students were English language learners.
Neither Texas A&M nor Dallas ISD responded to a request for comment Monday regarding their use of the H-1B program to staff their institutions.
President Donald Trump has already begun to tighten the reins on the H-1B program, instituting a new $100,000 sponsorship fee in September. Additionally, many applicant interviews have been delayed months, if not years. The administration has also added social media screenings to the vetting process.
