Your Rights as a Filipino Teacher or Worker in the United States

Updated November 2, 2026. We corrected this page, and we would rather say so plainly. The earlier version gave recruitment-fee figures we could not tie to any source. It said the New Mexico Attorney General had won a court ruling that a recruiter’s fees showed a “gross disparity”; that finding came in a different case, the recruiter’s own collection suit against one teacher, and the Attorney General’s case was a set of allegations. It also said a law-enforcement declaration makes a T visa application “significantly stronger,” which is not what the regulation says. The fee table, the tax example, the enforcement results and the T visa section now rest on the sources linked in the text, and the T visa section now explains why Filipino teachers who paid large recruitment fees have mostly lost their T visa appeals.

You found a teaching position in the United States. You signed the contracts, paid the fees your recruiter asked for, and boarded the plane. Now you are teaching in a Montana or Wyoming school district, sending money home every month — and wondering why, after taxes and recruiter payments, there is so little left. You wonder if what is being taken from you is legal. You wonder if you can leave.

The answer to both questions matters. What many recruiters charge Filipino teachers and workers is not legal — or occupies a dangerous gray zone that advocacy organizations, courts, and state attorneys general are increasingly willing to challenge. And your ability to change employers is a right that exists under federal law, regardless of what your contract says.

This article explains what U.S. law actually provides for workers here on H-1B and J-1 visas, what the fee landscape really looks like, and what legal options exist when things go wrong. It is written for workers, not for employers or recruiters. If your school district’s H-1B petition received a Request for Evidence about your degree, license or job description, see how a district answers a specialty occupation RFE for a teacher.

Most teachers recruited from the Philippines come to the United States through the J-1 exchange visitor program, which carries its own rules on duration and returning home.

H-1B Workers: The Law Is on Your Side

Employer Expenses Cannot Be Shifted to You

The H-1B visa is an employer-sponsored visa. Congress designed it that way deliberately. The employer files the petition, the employer bears the filing fees, and the employer — not you — bears the cost of the attorney who prepared the application.

Federal regulation at 20 CFR § 655.731 makes clear that H-1B-related costs that are business expenses of the employer cannot be deducted from wages in a way that would bring the worker below the required wage. The regulation expressly lists attorney fees and the costs of preparing and filing the Labor Condition Application and the H-1B petition as the employer’s business expenses (20 CFR § 655.731(c)(9)). And the employer may never receive any part of the ACWIA training fee from you, directly or indirectly (§ 655.731(c)(10)(ii)).

Depending on the employer and the petition, the employer’s costs can include:

• The base I-129 filing fee
• The $500 fraud prevention and detection fee, for a first H-1B petition or a change of employer (INA § 214(c)(12))
• The ACWIA training fee, although primary and secondary schools are exempt from it (8 CFR 214.2(h)(19)(iii))
• The Asylum Program Fee (added in 2024), which a nonprofit employer does not pay (8 CFR 106.2(c)(13))
• Attorney fees for the employer’s legal counsel

Under the H-1B wage rules, none of these costs may be shifted to you in a way that brings your pay below the required wage, whether as a payroll deduction or a separate payment (20 CFR 655.731(c)(9), (c)(12)), and an employer that owes the ACWIA fee may never take any part of it from you. Whether a repayment agreement can recover anything else turns on state liquidated-damages law; our guide to H-1B repayment agreements explains where the line falls.

Portability: Your Right to Change Employers

Under a provision called AC21 portability — codified at INA § 214(n) — an H-1B worker who was lawfully admitted in H-1B status, has not worked without authorization, and is still within the authorized stay may start working for a new H-1B employer as soon as that employer files a nonfrivolous H-1B petition, or on the start date the petition requests if that is later (8 CFR 214.2(h)(2)(i)(H)). If USCIS denies the petition, that new employment must stop. There is no waiting period. You do not need your current employer’s permission. You do not need to ask.

AC21 portability is a statutory right. No contract can take it away from you. Your employer cannot require you to waive it.

Repayment Agreements: When Employers Try to Lock You In

You may have signed a contract requiring you to repay H-1B fees if you leave employment within a certain period — often two or three years. These agreements are common. Federal rules do not let an employer push your pay below the required wage to recover its H-1B filing and attorney costs, and the ACWIA fee, where the employer owes it, can never be recovered from you at all.

Legitimate employer expenses that may form the basis of a repayment agreement in limited circumstances include genuinely distinct relocation assistance or signing bonuses — but only if they are clearly separate from any H-1B-related cost and structured carefully. Even these are legally uncertain. If your contract conflates relocation assistance with H-1B fees, the entire agreement may be unenforceable.

If you have questions about a specific repayment agreement, this is exactly the kind of issue where a strategy consultation with an experienced immigration attorney is worth the time.

J-1 Teachers: A Different Visa, a Dangerous Regulatory Gap

The Regulatory Framework — and Its Critical Gap

The J-1 exchange visitor program is governed by the Department of State, not the Department of Labor. This matters enormously, because the wage protection machinery that makes H-1B fee shifting illegal simply does not exist in the J-1 framework.

Under 22 CFR Part 62, which governs the Exchange Visitor Program, teacher sponsors must disclose fees. The Teacher category rule at 22 CFR § 62.24(g) requires sponsors to publish a summary of fees and costs (the sponsor fee, foreign or domestic third-party or partner fees, visa and SEVIS fees, insurance, living-cost estimates, and estimates for all other fees) and, before a teacher signs any contract with a host school, to give the teacher specific information on the fees and costs they will owe, including any placement fees.

But disclosure is not prohibition. There is no provision in 22 CFR Part 62 that prohibits sponsors or recruitment agencies from charging fees to teachers. When the Department of State rewrote the Teacher category rules, it chose disclosure over prohibition.

This is the gap that predatory agencies have exploited for decades. Unlike H-1B workers, J-1 teachers have no federal regulatory hook that directly prohibits the fees they are being charged. A teacher unsure of their status can confirm whether the two-year rule still applies through a free State Department advisory opinion before making plans to stay.

What Recruitment Fees Actually Look Like

What teachers are charged varies widely, and the spread is itself the lesson. The figures below come from reporting, a lawsuit and an agency decision in New Mexico and Louisiana. They show what teachers have actually been charged, not what is lawful, and they are not a price list.

The Pre-Tax Problem: Your Real Cost Is Higher Than You Think

Your salary is quoted to you before taxes, but you pay the recruiter out of what is left after taxes. So a fee costs you more, measured in salary, than its face amount.

Here is an illustration, not tax advice. Take a $55,000 salary and a fee of 15% of it, which is $8,250 a year. If taxes take 20 cents of each extra dollar you earn, you have to earn about $10,300 before tax to have $8,250 left to hand over. The “15%” fee is really closer to 19% of your salary. When you are paying rent, food, a car, insurance and support for family in the Philippines, that difference is the difference between getting ahead and treading water for three years.

Your own rate depends on facts this page cannot know. Wyoming has no state income tax; Montana does. A J-1 teacher is usually treated as a nonresident for tax purposes for the first two calendar years (IRS), and nonresident J-1 teachers are generally exempt from Social Security and Medicare tax (IRS); after that, those taxes apply. Ask a tax preparer who works with nonresident teachers to run your own numbers.

Legal Remedies That Actually Work

If you are a J-1 teacher being charged abusive fees, the absence of a federal immigration-specific prohibition does not mean you are without options. Several legal frameworks apply.

A teacher reaching the end of a five-year program should confirm whether the two-year home-residency rule still applies, The 2024 Skills List removed many countries, but the Philippines remains on it, including elementary, secondary, special education and subject-area teaching (89 Fed. Reg. 97693), so most Filipino J-1 teachers are still subject to the rule. If the teacher is clear of the rule, the employing district can often sponsor an H-1B; the district’s side of that conversion is explained separately.

State Consumer Protection Laws

The cases that have produced results against predatory teacher recruiters have come mostly from state law, not federal immigration law. In January 2021 the New Mexico Attorney General sued Total Teaching Solutions International and its owner under the state Unfair Practices Act, alleging that the company charged about $15,000 for services other companies provided for about $4,000 (KRWG). Those are allegations. Separately, when the company sued one of its teachers to collect, a Lincoln County magistrate judge dismissed the suit, finding, as the teachers’ union reported it, that the fees “resulted in a gross disparity between the value that she received and the fees imposed upon her” (AFT New Mexico release).

Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota each have consumer protection statutes that prohibit unfair and deceptive practices. An agency that misrepresented the services it would provide, charged fees undisclosed at the time of signing, or threatened legal action to collect debts arising from unconscionable contracts may be reachable under these laws.

Louisiana shows both what can be won and how long it takes. In April 2010 a Louisiana Workforce Commission administrative law judge found that the recruiter of hundreds of Filipino teachers had operated without a Louisiana license and ordered it to return placement fees the teachers’ union estimated at $1.8 million, plus a $500 fine (GMA News); a state court affirmed in 2011 (GMA News). In December 2012 a federal jury in Los Angeles ordered the recruiter to pay the teachers $4.5 million (SPLC case page). Winning is not the same as collecting: in 2017 the teachers were reported to have received nothing from that judgment yet (KSLA).

Pay Commensurate With U.S. Teachers

J-1 exchange-teacher sponsors must ensure that a teacher’s duties, hours, and compensation are commensurate with those of similarly situated U.S. teachers in the school district or host school (22 CFR § 62.24). If fees taken from your paycheck, or withheld by the district for a recruiter, leave you paid less than that, raise it with your sponsor and the school district, and ask an attorney whether state wage law gives you a claim.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act

Federal law treats a narrow kind of labor exploitation as trafficking. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a “severe form of trafficking in persons” for labor means recruiting or obtaining a person for work “through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery” (22 U.S.C. § 7102(11)(B)).

Two things must both be present: a means (force, fraud, or coercion, which includes threats of serious harm and the abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process) and an end (servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery). “Debt bondage” has its own narrow definition. Put in plain terms, the worker’s labor is pledged as security for a debt, and either the value of the work is not credited against the debt or the length and nature of the work are not limited and defined (§ 7102(7)).

That is why a large fee, even an unlawful one, is not by itself trafficking. A fee you owe and pay off in installments from your salary is a debt. It becomes debt bondage when your labor itself is the security and the debt is built so that you can never work it off.

The T Visa: Protection for Trafficking Victims — And Why You Need an Attorney

How the T Visa Works

T nonimmigrant status, usually called the T visa, gives a victim of a severe form of trafficking who is in the United States legal status, work authorization and a possible path to a green card. You apply to USCIS on Form I-914. You must show that you are or were a victim of a severe form of trafficking; that you are in the United States on account of the trafficking; that you have complied with any reasonable request from law enforcement for help (unless you were under 18 or trauma prevents it); and that you would suffer extreme hardship involving unusual and severe harm if removed (INA § 101(a)(15)(T)).

Reporting is not optional for most applicants. Unless trauma prevents you from cooperating, or you were under 18, you must at a minimum have contacted a law enforcement agency with jurisdiction to report the trafficking, and one documented contact can be enough (8 CFR 214.208(b), (e)).

A law enforcement declaration, Form I-914 Supplement B, can come from an agency such as the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD), which considers a request when the trafficking arises in an employment relationship and there is a credible allegation that the employer violated a law WHD enforces; it also weighs whether another agency is better placed to certify, and the decision is entirely discretionary (WHD FAQ). For an H-1B teacher, WHD enforces the H-1B wage rules; a J-1 teacher may need a different agency. The regulation is plain about what a declaration does not do: it is optional, “is not given any special evidentiary weight,” and does not lead to automatic approval, and USCIS, not the agency, decides whether you were a trafficking victim (8 CFR 214.204(e), (g)). A declaration is still useful evidence that you reported and cooperated.

A T visa holder who still has T status can apply for a green card after three years of continuous physical presence in T status, or sooner if the Attorney General finds the trafficking investigation or prosecution complete. They must have had good moral character throughout and, during that time, either complied with reasonable requests for help from law enforcement or show they would suffer extreme hardship involving unusual and severe harm if removed. USCIS decides as a matter of discretion (INA § 245(l)).

What Happened When Filipino Teachers Applied for T Visas

The teachers recruited from the Philippines in the late 2000s are the clearest record of how these cases go. The Louisiana recruiter lost before a state agency and a federal jury, as described above. When teachers then applied for T visas, USCIS’s Administrative Appeals Office dismissed their appeals in a long run of non-precedent decisions, most of them from 2014 to 2019 and continuing into 2021. It had dismissed earlier Filipino teachers’ appeals in 2007, and in 2024 it dismissed the appeal of a Filipino J-1 teacher placed in Colorado (AAO, Mar. 19, 2024). We found no Filipino teacher’s T visa appeal that the AAO sustained. Approvals at USCIS service centers are not published, so this record shows only the cases that were denied and appealed.

The 2018 decision in Matter of B-L-A- shows the reasoning. The teacher said she paid more than $21,000, borrowed from her own bank; that her passport was taken when she arrived; and that she was made to sign for another 10% of her second-year salary. The AAO accepted that she had been recruited through fraud. It still dismissed the appeal: she had not pledged her work as security for a debt, she had paid the fees off, and fraud without the purpose of debt bondage is not a severe form of trafficking. It added that her trips abroad after the fees were paid, to visit a sick parent and for an anniversary, meant she was not in the United States on account of trafficking.

Those decisions applied the older regulation. DHS rewrote the T visa rules in 2024 (89 Fed. Reg. 34864), but the definition of debt bondage comes from the statute and did not change, and the current rule still treats a departure after the trafficking as breaking the link to it unless an exception applies (8 CFR 214.207(b)).

This matches what we have heard from Filipino workers over the years: workers who paid Philippine agencies a large share of their U.S. salaries applied for T visas and were turned down. The fees were real, and often unlawful. The cases failed on the elements.

What this means for you: an unlawful recruitment fee is usually a wage, contract, or consumer-protection claim, and those claims can work. A T visa is for the narrower case where the debt was the leash: threats of serious harm or deportation to keep you working, documents taken to keep you in place, a debt built to grow faster than you can pay it. A recruiter who lied to you abroad about the job may also have committed “fraud in foreign labor contracting” (18 U.S.C. § 1351), one of the crimes that can support a U visa when the victim suffered substantial physical or mental abuse; our U visa guide explains what that route takes. And because weak trafficking filings slow the honest ones, read how fraud mills slow honest T visa and VAWA cases before trusting anyone who promises a T visa for a fee dispute.

Why T Visa Cases Are Hard Without Experienced Counsel

I want to be direct with you about something the standard T visa literature does not say.

T visa certification from law enforcement is discretionary. In my practice, I have seen certifications issued and denied on substantially identical fact patterns. WHD does not explain why it declines a particular request; it says only that it chose not to certify.

A non-certification is not a legal finding that trafficking did not occur. It is a discretionary decision by an individual investigator. It can be followed by re-application, or by pursuing certification from a different qualifying law enforcement agency, including state authorities.

There is also an important tactical consideration. Unless the trauma exception applies, you will have to report to law enforcement at some point; the question is how and when, not whether. How a worker frames their story when first speaking with a WHD investigator — before an attorney has organized the relevant facts around the statutory elements — can shape whether a certification follows. Workers who speak with investigators before consulting with counsel sometimes inadvertently undermine their own cases by omitting the very facts that establish coercion and debt bondage.

The time to contact an immigration attorney is before you speak with WHD, not after.

Before You Sign Anything: Practical Guidance

The single most important thing a Filipino teacher or worker can do before accepting any employment offer involving H-1B or J-1 sponsorship is to understand who is charging what, to whom, and whether any of it is legal.

For H-1B workers:

• The H-1B filing fees and the employer’s attorney fees are the employer’s costs, not yours. A separate recruiter’s fee is a different question, and one to ask an attorney about.
• If an employer asks you to sign a repayment agreement covering H-1B fees, consult an attorney before signing. The agreement may be unenforceable, but you are better served knowing that before you sign than after.
• Your portability rights under AC21 cannot be waived by contract. You can start with a new H-1B employer as soon as it files a nonfrivolous petition for you, whatever the agreement says.

For J-1 teachers:

• Ask every sponsor and recruiter for a written list of every fee and cost before you agree to anything. Sponsors must publish a summary of their fees, and the sponsor or the host school must give you, before you sign with the school, specific information on the fees and costs you will pay, including any placement fees (22 CFR 62.24(g)). If a recruiter will not put it in writing, walk away.
• Fees vary enormously. At least one school district has brought in J-1 teachers for about $1,500 a teacher in sponsorship costs. If you are being asked for $5,000 or more, ask other sponsors what they charge.
• Monthly installment fee arrangements that extend through your entire program term are the mechanism predatory agencies use to maintain leverage over you. Understand the total amount before you agree to any installment structure.
• The fees look smaller because they come out of your paycheck gradually. Calculate the total — and remember that in real purchasing-power terms, paying a fee out of after-tax income costs you more than its face amount in pre-tax earnings.

For workers who believe their rights are being violated:

• Contact the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. File a complaint at dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact.
• J-1 teachers can also report a sponsor or host-school problem to the State Department’s J-1 Visa Emergency Hotline, 1-866-283-9090, available 24 hours a day (j1visa.state.gov/contact).
• Contact your state attorney general’s consumer protection office.
• Consult an immigration attorney before speaking with any investigator about potential trafficking-related claims.
• Know that retaliation against you for filing a complaint is explicitly prohibited under 22 CFR § 62.10(d). A sponsor cannot terminate your J-1 program solely because you asserted your rights or filed a complaint.

How Immigration Law of Montana Can Help

Our firm has handled T visa cases, including certifications and non-certifications, and we understand the difference between a case that can be made and one that cannot. We practice removal defense and humanitarian relief for clients across Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, and the broader Rocky Mountain region.

If you are an H-1B or J-1 worker who has questions about fees, repayment agreements, or your ability to change employers, or if you believe you may have a trafficking-related claim, we offer strategy consultations by phone, video, or in person. We will tell you honestly what the law provides, what it does not, and what your realistic options are.

Contact us at 406-373-9828 or schedule a consultation online.