Thread by @ritodhi_c

A long thread 📜on being an immigrant, a ECR and a parent in Aotearoa New Zealand, though I believe these experiences echo others across the world. #immigrant #precarious #AcademicTwitter #parent

My son Manu was born 7 days ago. However, since I am not on a permanent contract, I did not get any paid parental leave. Instead HR offered me the ‘choice’ of taking 2 weeks of unpaid leave. The word ‘choice’ here is key...

...because given my fixed term employment, my salary is barely enough to support a family of 3 and now 4. So, there really isn’t a choice. The choice is between having money to afford a roof over our head, food on our plates, utilities paid or not. Not much of a choice.

Friends and colleagues from all over the world, who are ECRs, parents and immigrants have shared their stories of exhaustion, precarity and anxiety over the years. Mine is not very different, however, it is also a testament to how broken, predatory and extractive academia is.

The exceptional precarity faced by graduate students in Aotearoa was recently powerfully exposed by a wonderful group of scholars, however, the stories of international graduate students and ECRs remains on the margins.

Our trauma shrouded by the discourse of clean, green, progressive Aotearoa and many kiwi’s have informed me, ‘how lucky we should feel that we are here’ and not out ‘there’ in the gun violence riddled streets of USA or the bureaucratically circuitous colonial spaces of Europe...

...Not to mention, the Global south. My precarity is primarily produced and sustained by two institutions. The status of being an immigrant and the status of being on the lowest rung of the neoliberal academy.

For example, since I am an immigrant, I am ineligible for the generous children’s subsidy given by the government to support families in need. Given my salary band this subsidy would amount to a little more than 100$ a week, which is 90% of our weekly grocery bill.

Also, since I am an immigrant, I remain ineligible for multiple grants/fellowships that are available for ECR support. Finally, and most disturbingly, my family and I live from visa to visa, much like we live pay check to pay-check, scrambling for documents every few months...

...to legitimise our presence in this nation. A nation that my Maori colleague has pointed out to me many times, is built on stolen land and fortified through cultural and ecological domination.

Yet, every year or so, I have to find money from my meagre income to pay thousands of dollars in visa fees, police clearance certificates, passport photos, medical checkups and mailing fees.

This system is in no way unique to Aotearoa NZ, and immigrants across the world, have the least access to any form of public socio-economic support, while being involved with the most extractive aspects of all industries. And universities here are just that - an industry.

An industry where I am a worker who is expected to follow the immoral and unethical work cultures, which adheres to a shifting scale of accountability, with those in the bottom being privy to none of it. I have had 6 papers published in the last 24 months that I have been here.

6 papers, 10 presentation, and 3 grants which I wrote, allowed the university to access economic/cultural capital. Yet, in return, the academic machine just gifted me with more fixed term contracts...

whose very ambiguity, allows the university to claim more, claim without compensation, to claim from those like me, shackled by the various regulations of immigrancy.

Through it all, what has been the most disheartening has been the silence of senior and permanent faculty. They are my colleagues, my friends, and yet through their silence they have helped sustain this extractive and abusive system.

The academy can be a dehumanising machine, nourished by the astronomical fees paid by international students and surplus labour extracted from precarious graduate students and ECRs like me. And, those with the power to hold it accountable are mute observers.

No matter what their intentions, the impact is quite clear and is ongoing. A friend of mine who was at a university in the US asked his supervisor for a few days off when his child was born. The response from the advisor was, “Your wife had the child, why do you need days off?”

While no one has directly said these words to me, the structures in place, essentially have curtailed my degrees of freedom, to incentivise such a choice.

Maybe that is what I should have done, abandoned my partner and forced her to take care of our two children - feed them, be emotionally available, take care of the household, while I went to work.

Ensuring that my feminist ally ship existed only in my theoretical musings, and not in the daily labour of survival, reproduction and wellbeing, which bind together our relational worlds. Instead every night after I put my son to bed at 9 pm, my work day begins, ending at 2am.

Academia can be such an anxiety inducing experience, and it is more so when you go to bed every night not knowing if you will be acknowledged as being a legitimate person allowed to stay within the borders of a certain state.

If we will have to leave with two unvaccinated children under the age of 7, even as our neighbourhoods fill up with European and White American retirees, waiting to replace us with their pensions and their politics.

Who should I hold accountable then, for my anxiety as a parent, as a POC, as an immigrant, as a scholar? Is it the colonial state whose litmus tests are only catalysed against immigrants from ‘shit hole countries’?

Is it the academy living off the unending labour of precarious ECRs and graduate students, whose futures are gate kept by powerful intellectual and cultural elites? Is it my own choice of wanting to be a parent?

Of having the impudence to dream of having a family without the financial clearance from our capitalocene?

I think about my mother’s hands, the way they cut the dense air between stanzas of Tagore’s songs, her eyes liquid with the smell of mustard oil, the jasmine that punctuates the sunlight through her kitchen window, and I remember that it’s been four years since I’ve last seen her

What do I do with such pain? Where do I keep it? In my closet next to the kurta from shantiniketan or in my son’s smile which she gave him as a gift? Being an immigrant can be such purgatory, our lives measured not in what we achieve, but what we miss.

People ask me these days, how is it living with a new born? Are you sleeping? Are you exhausted?

Manu does not exhaust me.

His breast milk stained cheeks are the trunk of a banyan, around which I wrap myself, like a hopeful creeper. I find different pieces of my ancestors in his body - his dimples from my grandfather, the curve of his back from my uncle - being his parent is like coming home.

No, what exhausts me is all that other stuff.

I know many people in my situation cannot talk about their trauma and their experiences, their stories are gagged by the fear of retaliation from the academy and the state.

Their silence is seen as compliance, but it is anything but. I fear those things as well.
But, maybe my sleepless parent brain has numbed my anxieties.
Or maybe, even as I write this at 9 am, I am exhausted, but my day has barely begun.