International students in different price brackets
The disparity of moving from the Global South and the Global North
“Why did you move to New Zealand?” I ask an acquaintance, originally from the UK who moved here two years ago.
She shrugs and smiles. “I just wanted to travel. See the world.”
It’s the same response I hear from other international students and immigrants from the Global North. Yet I still find it jarring as someone from the Global South.
As much as I want to simply be here for travel, it’s a luxury I can’t afford.
I am asked the same question: “Why did you move to New Zealand?”
I give a simple answer like, “I wanted to study abroad.”
I don’t explain the troubles of living in the Global South that pushed me here. How I used to stay up at night worried about the inefficient healthcare in the Philippines. I don’t say how my family’s fridge got emptier and emptier as the PH food prices skyrocketed. Or how a week working two jobs in Manila earned me the same amount as four hospo shifts in Wellington.
I don’t explain the 53°C heat waves, the frequent flooding, the typhoons that climate change has brought to the Philippines. That I lived through extrajudicial killings during former President Duterte’s term -- the sounds of ambulance sirens and dead bodies on the news leaving me hollow. Or that the growing presence of US military bases on our land, and Chinese vessels in our seas left many Filipinos, including myself, terrified of war.
Because of my Philippines citizenship and passport, I must spend more time and money to avail visas. Someone earning a minimum wage and working full time in the UK and US can afford to pay for the NZ$750 student visa fee within a week or two. But it would take a Filipino citizen from Metro Manila at least a month and a half to afford it thanks to the measly weekly wage equivelent to $97 New Zealand dollars.
On top of the visa fee, a Filipino citizen has to pay for tests (IELTS or PTE) to prove that we can understand and speak in English. Which is strange since English is one of our national languages. The exams don’t come cheap either. The PTE cost me $400 NZD, over half of my monthly income.
And if one fails the exam, they have to pay it again.
There are the smaller subtler things that gnawed at me until I moved to Aotearoa. That in PH I have to keep my queer identity a secret from conservative communities. That I developed a fear of marriages and pregnancies because divorce and abortion are still illegal in PH.
And those I’ve met here from the Global South have eerily similar reasons for leaving their home countries — A lesbian immigrant who wants to marry their long-term partner, someone who works to financially support the family they left behind, and an family who fled their country to escape violent civil wars.
As someone from the Global South, moving abroad is a decision that isn’t taken lightly. My family and I had been considering moving to Aotearoa since I was 11, and it took us six years of debating and two years to gather visa requirements, before I decided to study abroad.
Travel for the sake of travel is rarely the reason for leaving Global South homes. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to choose between staying put in constant discomfort and fear, or leaving everything behind just to have our basic needs met.
But it isn’t an ideal world, so we tear ourselves from our families, communities, and cultures, bearing loss and grief for the hope that one day, it will all be worth it. That one day, we will find the acceptance, opportunities, safety, and basic human rights that many of us cannot find in our homelands.
Until then, we grit our teeth as we pay the price of travel. We study, we work, we do our very best. We keep on hoping.