Social distancing hasn’t been new to recent immigrants as articulated in this piece, nor has it been to refugees or exiles. The context of this personal and collective reflection, however, is academia and its underpriviledged international bodies at work in Humanities departments whose relatively small numbers as citizens of low currency countries with less prestigious passports render their experiences largely invisible. (For the most recent discussion on the cost of being a scholar from the Global South, see here).
Other than having been in need of surrendering my burdens, the reasons for finally deciding to put these particular challenges in writing, which are experienced by the underprivileged international students and scholars, are manifold and in no particular order. And yet, timing is not merely coincidental and is partially triggered by recent engagements, one of which, among others, is a Twitter thread I stumbled upon on advising prospective doctoral students not to get a PhD because of nonexistent secure academic positions.
I’m sharing in light of these discussions as that formerly underprivileged international graduate student-worker and a present colleague working in Humanities of academia. I’m writing for myself, too, because after a decade of precarious existence, it’s no longer self-sustainable to having to constantly explain the peculiar and rare conditions under which I have worked and lived on every other occasion. I’m writing in solidarity with my fellow colleagues who don’t have passport privileges who feel as exhausted as I am in striving to voice their struggles. I’m writing for those colleagues and administrative staff who are willing to listen, acknowledge, and accommodate our particular hardships. I’m writing with current international graduate student-workers without passport privileges in mind who aspire to stay and work in the US academia in the future.
This semi self serving piece will thus shamelessly list some life-work facts about them, about us, about me.
A single international graduate student-worker from a low currency country without passport privilege and not coming from wealth encounters specific kind of hurdles in addition to those shared by all international graduate student-workers. These students cannot ask for money from their parents, afford to go home during the breaks or to national conferences (let alone international ones) although they’re granted partial or full funding. First type of funding only minimally covers the cost of travel and accommodation, and in the second case, most of the time they’re supposed to pay ahead and later get reimbursed (latter was the case for my institution). I’m not even going into the impossibility of travelling to international conferences since it’s already been mentioned in the first piece above. If you’re not already one such student or academic reading this, please notice the extend to which this crucial gap negatively impacts these students’ academic job prospects in the future. They’re left to choose between food insecurity and academic rigor.
If you think this is all that is about the struggles of underprivileged international student-workers, you’ll be disappointed to hear what comes next. An international student who is also married to a non-student with the same background has to be the sole bread winner since the spouse will not be granted a work permit in the US. This student now has to feed at least two people (add child/ren) and pay an apartment’s full rent on a single 50% TA (Teaching Assistant) stipend. As one such student-worker, I had to teach every semester throughout my seven year PhD study in Humanities on that little stipend, which wasn’t so little for us in the end. Attending to national conferences let alone international ones was out of the question. (One equitable opportunity the pandemic unintentionally created was forcing conferences to take place remotely, which benefited underprivileged international graduate student-workers and scholars more than others).
You all might be thinking then how and why one mitigates these extraordinary challenges. Speaking from personal experience, first, I had no other alternative, and, second I was fortunate enough to have supportive mentors, all of whom, by the way, were people of color. To expand the first, I didn’t have a choice of leaving academia and pursuing another path as my visa was only a provisional student one, which would have ended if my student status had come to a halt. I was not only an international graduate student-worker but was also in self-inflicted exile turned political exile (and still I am), which meant that I couldn’t go back even for a short visit or else would have risked not coming back. I have been basically stuck in the states for the last seven years.
I’m not sure if I need to remind that international graduate student-workers are officially foreign aliens, and they cannot get any government related aid, either. If they decide to get such funding nevertheless, it might be used in the future against them when they apply for immigraton.
Despite these material and mental difficulties, and thanks to the support of mentors and friends (one must have such privilege of having a support group), one could manage to graduate. Still, such a student has to land in a position without a break, meaning, they have to have already found a job for the following academic year to be able to graduate! This is a widely known and rarely articulated reality of being an international graduate student-worker in the US. One tweet with #AcademicPrecarity reads as follows: “Unfortunately the young academic’s drama is universal. Since there’s no hope from the current ‘job market,’ a young academic who is at the end of their PhD in North American unies, postpones their defense so that they can work a bit more as a student” (my translation).
Against all odds, let’s assume that with some luck and perseverance, an international (single) graduate student-worker has landed in an academic position. Even this miracle will not solve the problems with the said academic since they will have been transferred from the student visa to the professional one (H1-B) most commonly happening after a year of optional practical training (what is called an OPT). This new visa is now dependent on that particular position and institution with workload and skill restrictions; that is, one cannot easily change their institution unless another academic institution is willing to sponsor a new visa for the candidate, which is completely at the prospective institution’s dicredition, by the way. Notice that I’m not even talking about non-academic positions here, whose probability of occurence for this population (in Humanities) is presumably closer to that of dying in a plane crash.
I haven’t forgotten about the poor married international graduate student-worker! (How can I? I am the initial reason for this lenghty grievance) You might be thinking now that the student-worker is a full-time faculty/researcher, their spouse must (of course) also be working. Well (Hell?) not so soon. The spouse under the spousal, dependant, visa (H-4) cannot, in fact, work until the academic spouse’s visa is renewed by the institution in three or four years time. (In fact, even this future work possibility was put into risk by the former government; therefore, there’s no future guarantee that a dependant spouse will ever be able to work). In short, the total number of years for this student to be academic who has to sustain a family by herself is on average a decade. Please remind me that we’re all in this together, equally.
I will not suggest prospective students to not pursue a PhD in Humanities precisely because this message completely disregards students from underepresented backgrounds (international, from the Global South, first-generation, rural) who have to go through these abundantly extra hurdles to get even remotely close to the academic positions occupied by the ones already widely represented in Human(ities) of academia: North American, white, English as first language speaker, wo/men with predominantly professor parents from elite institutions.
Remote doesn’t necessarily evoke isolation in me as an academic already in exile. I aspire more for the potential it can invoke in allies to push against the established academic bureaucracy that disproportionately harms one of its most precarious laborers: the academics from the global majority.
