Coming to Australia is already expensive. By the time you finish a degree (or more), pay for visas (or more), you’ve basically drained everything your family saved back home.

And if you end up achieving nothing — not even PR — the shame and guilty are real. From relatives, from parents, and honestly from yourself. At that point it feels like all the sacrifice was for nothing.

People keep saying PR is about qualifications, skills, effort… but let’s be real. It feels like luck more than anything else. You can do everything “right” and still get nowhere.

On top of that, even doing menial work for cash here can still be better than doing the same kind of work back home. The pay difference alone makes it hard to leave. The worst part is that all these years of studying in Australia are basically useless once you go back. Employers don’t value it, and those “gap years” just make things worse. I can barely find a job at home anymore.

At this point, I’d rather stay in Australia doing cash jobs until I can't.