HispanicVista Columnists

Education/Immigration News
Frontera NorteSur
January 12, 2008

Two Filipino immigrants have entered into a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in an El Paso case that involved the recruitment of teacher "guest-workers" for schools in the Texas borderlands and other parts of the United States. Noel Cedro Tolentino and his mother, Florita Torentino, pleaded guilty in federal court early this month to a reduced charge of conspiracy to defraud the US government. The pair had faced 40 charges of conspiracy to traffic in undocumented workers, fraud and money laundering.

In 2004, a federal grand jury accused the Tolentinos along with other individuals, including several El Paso school officials, and three companies of deceiving Filipino teachers about employment prospects in El Paso and the United States, and of fraudulently obtaining visas. The companies linked to the alleged teacher trafficking network were Ovni Consortium Inc., Multicultural Professionals and Multicultural Education Consultants.

According to the US federal government, the accused traffickers hatched a scheme in December 2001 to illegally bring Filipino teachers to the United States and then economically exploit the educators once they were in the country. Reportedly, teachers paid as much as $10,000 to obtain employment in the United States. Noel Tolentino, Ovni Consortium and Multicultural Professionals were also accused of offering to pay Texas school administrators for trips to the Philippines in order to interview teacher candidates.

As part of the deal, each administrator would then agree to facilitate H-1B work visas for ten Filipino nationals. Leticia Zamarripa, El Paso spokesperson for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said 153 Filipino teachers were contracted by four El Paso-area school districts between 2002 and 2004.

In some respects, the teacher recruitment scam was reminiscent to the decades-old practice of some farm labor contractors who advertise for greater numbers of workers than are actually needed. After arriving to the United States, most of the would-be Filipino teachers discovered that no job was waiting for them. In Brownsville, Texas, for instance, 273 Filipino teachers were brought to the city but fewer than 100 actually were given jobs. The Tolentinos, charged the government, then illegally “shopped” the jobless teachers around to other school districts in violation of visa regulations. As the El Paso case demonstrates, alleged irregularities, abuses and illegalities have also accompanied the recruitment of "bracero" teachers.

In March 2007, US District Judge Kathleen Cardone declared a mistrial in legal proceedings against the Tolentinos after it was revealed that two of the jurors read an article about the case in a newspaper. The two defendants, who were forced to forfeit properties, now face up to five years federal prison and fines of $250,000. They are scheduled to be sentenced on March 19 of this year.

Although not widely publicized, legal guest-worker programs in the United States have long been used to fill a limited number of jobs in agricultural and other occupations employers claim are hard to fill with willing workers. In recent years, low pay and stressful working conditions for teachers in many US schools have likewise resulted in a scramble to fill classroom positions, especially in math, science, special education and bilingual education. School districts in the Southwest and other regions of the United States have turned to the Philippines, Spain, Mexico and other nations to help meet the shortages.
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Sources: El Diario de El Paso, January 10, 2008. Article by Lorena Figueroa. El Paso Times, January 4, 2008. Article by Louie Gilot.

Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies
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