Informed Campus

UBC advertises its campus as an incredibly diverse place, in no small part thanks to the significant proportion of international students that they enrol. However, many find upon arriving here that all is not what it seems: work and funding options are incredibly limited, making life difficult to afford in an expensive city like Vancouver. And that's not to mention that we are also burdened with things like unequal health insurance fees, visa or immigration difficulties, and often times being ways away from family and support systems. International students aren't the only ones under the migrant student umbrella, but we are the ones who are treated as cash cows by the university. UBC then in turn uses our image for its own social capital without providing adequate resources to ensure our wellbeing in a new country.

However, many people on campus don't know about these issues, or aren't sure how to talk about them. Not only that, but many haven't been given the resources to understand how migrant student struggles are inextricably tied to migrant worker struggles (specifically in Canada's agriculture and healthcare industry), decolonization and anti-imperialism struggles back in our home countries, climate justice, struggles against racial capitalism, and the struggle for land back. Our goal at MSU is to create resources, compile readings, and promote these materials so that more people— both migrants and non-migrants— are able to understand how these structures play out in their own lives and the lives of those in our shared UBC community. We also are working on translating these materials into more languages— starting with Chinese and Spanish. If you speak another language and would like to translate, reach out!

We also have a collaborative reading list!