“I have an accent, so people know I’m not from here”: a racial and ethnic analysis of international STEM faculty in Hawai‘i

ABSTRACT

Immigration policies in the Global North often prioritize migrants based on professional qualifications, leading to a reliance on the labour of “highly-skilled migrants” (HSM), especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Yet, the workplace experiences of HSM have been understudied, including in higher education. Based on 50 interviews with STEM faculty in Hawai‘i, we identified that HSM faculty held distinct ways of negotiating employment circumstances that were categorically different than Hawai‘i or U.S.-born faculty. While some HSM expressed feelings of inclusion in their multi-ethnic workplace, others shared stories of bias and discrimination. To untangle this divergence, we conceptualize the professional workplace in Hawai‘i as one shaped by histories of occupation and migration. Using “ethnic embodiment” (Retsikas) and Hill-Collins’ “outsider within”, our analysis contributes to scholarship on the career pathways of HSM, as we consider how histories of place can influence perceptions of ethnic and racial belongingness.

KEYWORDS:

• Race and ethnicity
• migration
• highly-skilled migrants
• STEM
• Hawai’i
• higher education

Acknowledgements

We greatly appreciate the research assistance of Loke Aloua, Kaylee DeCambra, and Sunny Arashiro. We also thank the interview participants for their time and consideration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although not our focus here, we argue that Kanaka ‘Ōiwi faculty – nearly absent in STEM fields in the community colleges – also do not benefit from this construction of “localness” within professional workplaces.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an NSF ADVANCE Partnership [grant number 1725604].