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The plight of the migrant worker. This sensational story has frequently made it to the headlines of Western media in the last decade. The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC News, Human Rights Watch — you get the point. Ironically, what hasn’t made it on these investigative scoops are the voices of those migrants.

Who gets to decide what their plight really means?

As idle onlookers, we often write papers and debate with full vigor over the Kafala system, the intricacies of labour compliance and the importance of human rights and self-determination. As we should. However, maybe if we spoke to the people we write about and talk on behalf of and truly listened to their lived experiences, we may find that we have missed out on countless narratives. Narratives that run parallel to mainstream media but exist in the periphery of our manicured society. Narratives that are messy, contradictory and many times dismissive of our third-party research and preemptive assumptions. And most importantly, narratives that have many sub-narratives and micro-realities that are equally imperative to be heard and understood.

I went in search of these missing stories, and what I found was riveting. A recent Ugandan immigrant went for a housekeeping job interview and was rejected. “We are not hiring Africans here,” she was told by the subcontractor. She has two months left in the country until her visa expires. A Public Safety officer from West Africa finds language to be his biggest challenge in Abu Dhabi. His supervisor, an immigrant from India, gives instructions in a language that he does not understand but his coworkers do. He has struggled with the barrier of language for years. Here, it is crucial to remember that these instances of exclusion have been imposed by immigrants too — many of whom are subject to similar kinds of discrimination by their own employers or simply by the existence of a systemic social hierarchy. Perhaps both.

Let’s bring it closer to home. A female contracted colleague, who works on our campus, feels “embarrassed” going out into the city because of the way people look at her. “Some men ask you how much?,” she shared, “even when you dress decently.” Her experience is the lived reality of thousands of African women in the city, who are black first and immigrant second. The people violating her sense of dignity are not necessarily privileged men in white-collar jobs, but male construction workers who we often associate the word ‘exploitation’ with.

How do we negotiate that?

We are all victims of victims; some will say it’s a vicious cycle, but that’s the easy way out. The psychological violence that occurs on the grounds of race, language, and gender is no new phenomenon. Discrimination in the workplace continues to take place in the Global North. As a woman walking alone at night, I feel no less safe in New York than I do in my home country.

These are global problems, but we are so caught up in labelling migrant communities as marginalized that we have missed out on all the complexities and tensions that exist within their personal lives. However well-intentioned neoliberal media and academia may be, they have generated a definite “Us versus Them” narrative — a stance that patronizes all that the ‘Them’ encompasses. The lives of our dining hall cashiers, Public Safety colleagues and Serco cleaning staff are as rich and dynamic as ours. The construction worker who has been reduced to a number in an investigative report has multiple other experiences that define him. Our excessive fixation with the label ‘migrant worker’ — which I, too, am guilty of — is not only reductive but equally undignifying.

You see, this parallel narrative of migrant experiences won’t come up in the headlines because it is mundane and universal. We all go through such things. However, we also talk about it; we are given spaces to debrief, rant and protest.

For those whose experiences are not even acknowledged, where do they start?

I asked the female contracted colleague if she or her friends had ever tried to raise concerns about the discrimination they face as black women. She took a long pause and said to me, “if we keep complaining about it, we’ll become the problem.” And so she, like many others, has chosen to remain silent.