Opinion: He shouted, 'You foreigners making big money off other people,' and my face turned hot

22 Oct 2024, 18:00 by Priyanka Borpujari, https://www.thejournal.ie/author/priyanka-borpujari/ · TheJournal.ie

“You cannot simply drive south from Budapest to Sarajevo. Bosnia is not part of the EU. The closest you can drive up to is the southern border of Slovenia, since it was the first country in the former Yugoslavia to become part of the EU.”

I TELL THIS to my friend in the US over a phone call, who wants me to travel with him to Sarajevo soon. Reporting on the general elections in Bosnia in 2018, I saw how an end-to-war agreement masquerading as a peace agreement still inflicted wounds of corruption and bitterness in the land of Josip Tito.

As I narrate this on the phone, the man sitting ahead of me on bus route 83—as I make my way home to Finglas—turns and looks towards me, and scoffs. I don’t think much of it; I lower my voice in case he is upset that I am too loud on the phone. I know this feeling too well; too often I have told people on the bus to lower the volume of the video playing on their phone.

A few minutes after my call ends, the man gets up to get off, but not without saying aloud: “You foreigners making big money off other people.” All I could mutter was a shocked “WOW”! I looked at the girl sitting next to me; she looked almost stereotypically Irish, with the colour of her hair and the sun-kisses on her face. She continued looking into her phone as though she had heard nothing; the man had jumped off the bus by then.

‘My face turned hot’

Even after he got off the bus, that old bald man dressed in tattered jeans kept looking at me as the bus rolled on, and I could sense my face turning hot and red, and my eyes welling up. Was he yet another man living in poverty, failed by the state, that he felt emboldened to say those things to me? I wouldn’t know; tattered jeans have been in fashion for a while now. Did the girl sitting next to me have her earphones on? Clearly not. Did she agree with his words in her silence? That worried me more.

It has been almost three years since I moved to Ireland to pursue a PhD—one in which we are paid below-minimum-wage; we are meant to teach undergraduate students; and our spouses do not have the right to work. Not once have I faced a rude comment like the one uttered by that man: dare I call it a racist remark?

What I have faced are numerous instances on my university campus where I am reminded of how I must behave. When I was sharing how we are all blindsided by the impossibility of living on the pittance of a stipend in an inordinately expensive city, and when universities profit off the accommodation during a housing crisis, a senior award-winning European professor told me to my face: “You should feel lucky to be here.” It was not a racist remark, but even so, everyone has told me that it is a deeply problematic one.

Just slogans?

Back on that sunny but cold March afternoon this year, I walked along with fellow Dubliners to show my solidarity towards refugees, on this island of a hundred thousand welcomes. It was my obvious duty to flow with the people of this city that is my home now. But beyond the lovely slogans, is there really a space for me here?

Diversity and inclusion are such buzzwords that the lived realities of being a non-EU citizen living in Ireland are something that even people working within the offices for diversity and inclusion are clueless about. That we need to renew our annual resident permit for a steep annual fee of EUR 300—something unique to Ireland. Where has all that money gone? Towards a bike shed?

Universities expect us PhD researchers to travel to conferences and present our work; it builds the university’s reputation. But for that, we need a Schengen visa to the rest of the EU, and the tedious queues to secure an appointment are somehow more tolerable than the rudeness of the bureaucrats adjudicating on our documents, lest we become parasites in their countries. Never mind that there are no funds for research, let alone to attend conferences.

I often discuss this with a friend from South Africa who has made Ireland her home and works closely with policymaking. We know that Ireland is more likely to listen to a person of colour from the US about the different forms of institutional microaggressions than to listen to people who experience these in Ireland. But then again, I think a PoC from the US complaining about racism in Ireland might be dismissed on the belief that there is much more racism in the US.

‘I should have shouted back’

The man jumped out of the bus too soon, or I would have yelled. Somehow, I have developed a reputation for not shying away from making a scene. As the bus emptied by the time I had to get off, I walked to the driver, asking him if he would have booted me off the bus if I had made a scene, for that man’s remark to me.