As Bell Hooks puts it “I came to theory because I was hurting…I wanted to make the hurt go away.”[1] Like Hooks, I saw in theory a location for healing. Using my lived experience as an international student in the United States, I argue that although our labor is compensated, there are myriad factors that negatively impact the reproduction of labor for international students. I employ the Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) as a lens through which to investigate how capitalism, exploitation, and oppression are embedded in migration. SRT asks the question: if workers produce commodities, who produces the worker? SRT encompasses the social processes that produce labor power as a commodity and looks at how capitalism treats workers as commodities.

While I write in Iowa City on my IPad in my basement apartment, I reflect on my five-year sojourn at the University of Benin in Nigeria where I taught in the Religions Department. On a sunny day, September 5, 2015, I got my appointment letter as an assistant lecturer at the University. My heart leaped for joy as the “yoke of unemployment was broken” since I had been out of a job for two years. My immediate family was the happiest. Little did they know that the Japa wind would blow in 2021 after an extensive ASUU (Academic Staff Union of Universities) strike that lasted nine months.  Japa is a word used by the South-Western people of Nigeria that means to run away or to flee from one place to another. In the last decade, it became a widely used term in Nigeria to connote emigration from Nigeria to other countries like the United States, Britain, Europe, and other places in the Global North.

It is widely assumed that migration improves the living standard of immigrants. Migration continues to bring promises of opportunities and benefits while obscuring the struggles and perennial negative effects it causes for the migrant. The community migrant workers resettle into benefits from the labor pool and the home countries who get remittances from migrants benefit from their international labor. However, the laboring migrant experiences a deduction on many levels, including family issues back home, culture shock, housing instability, harsh weather, and often extenuating working conditions.

As an international graduate student and teaching assistant with many hats- a mother, sister, and daughter- Japa has come with a cost. It’s a perennial cost constantly reminding me that family must thrive as career advances, a duty enforced by Nigeria’s patriarchal society that classifies a good child as coming from the father, and a misbehaving child from the mother. I have to grapple with the home front and gender expectations while keeping my sanity as a student who must show up in the classroom to contribute meaningfully to discussions, grade and attend office hours. Summer breaks have not been left out as I needed to work on campus to pay bills and send money back home for the smooth running of the family. Travelling home to see family is not only expensive but comes with a lot of visa hiccups. These are the myriad issues international students must deal while producing labor for the smooth running of the university in a capitalist society.

The SRT is instrumental in investigating labor performed outside the ambits of production by questioning how the reproduction of society in terms of gender, race, and sex produces and sustains the economy. It also examines the working-class family, migration, and slavery as sites for the reproduction of labor power and how these sites are arenas of contestation between labor and capital. [2] Migration is an essential factor in wealth accumulation and economic growth in a capitalist society and it is imperative to the main actors in this process be factored in. Putting it in context, even though migration seeks to provide economic solutions, the labor of international students remains interspersed in too many conflicting ways that reveal inadequate compensation on both academic and affective levels. International graduate students are often neglected by the very systems that they travel across to serve and produce labor for.

In proffering solutions to the problems of oppression and exploitation, Bannerji advocates for the political participation of progressive social movements and organizations to ensure that the demands of people are met.[3] Social equality, in other words, can only be achieved through participation. For me, I see The Campaign to Organize Graduate Students (COGS) as a pathway to holding the system accountable for the production of labor by teaching and research assistants. The organization has been instrumental in bargaining for the removal of International Student fees and in advocating for parental leave and pay raises for graduate students. COGS has been intentional and consistent in bargaining for better living conditions for graduate students. All the organizing and bargaining of COGS has been geared towards compensating graduate students for their productive work and recognizing their importance.

Unfortunately, a wide gap remains to be filled, as COGS can do little as a student organization limited by institutional and governmental power dynamics. The stringent laws on unionizing in the state of Iowa and the policies enacted by the Board of Regents stifle the prospects of COGS in addressing both the productive and reproductive aspects of labor. Parental leave, maternal health campaigns, and community building are some of the solutions COGS proposes to diminish the burden of graduate student’s reproductive labor. However, Japa remains a site of contestation that highlights the unattended production and reproduction of labor for international graduate students. SRT has helped to investigate the complications within these spaces and find solutions to students’ labor problems, often obscured by the constant demands of a capitalist society.