In July this year, attended the Animal Behaviour Society conference in Costa Rica, which I found to be very LGBTQ-friendly. The organisation had planned to have its 2023 meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee. But I was one of the more than 50 per cent of society members who voted not to attend if it was held in a state passing anti-transgender laws.

The laws in Tennessee ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports or deny transgender students use of the bathrooms consistent with their gender identity — and restricting a woman’s right to an abortion, such as Tennessee. I wouldn’t feel good spending money there or walking the streets. The society subsequently rescheduled the 2023 meeting to be held in Portland, Oregon.

I earned my PhD at University Putra Malaysia in Serdang in 2020 for a project to develop a targeted therapy for bladder cancer. After that, I returned to my home country of Nigeria. I currently lead the anatomy department at Bauchi State University, where I am passionate about genomics, bioinformatics and open science.

Both the United States and Canada have top-ranking institutions and researchers in these areas, and I have applied for postdoctoral positions in both countries.

I have a preference for Canada based, in part, on advice I received from colleagues. Both post-doctorates and principal investigators recommended that I go there because, they say, a visa to do a post-doctorate in the United States is very problematic to get. [Editor’s note: International postdocs in the United States typically use the study-based-visitor (J-1) or the specialty-occupation (H-1B) visas.]

Even if you get a visa, it can be challenging to renew. And I was told that these US visas can’t easily be used to seek citizenship without a permanent position. By contrast, in Canada, a visa can count towards permanent residence.

The other big concern is gun violence, which seems to have increased in the United States. That is scary – especially given that Black populations in the United States are targeted by police.

I’m finding that it takes a considerable amount of time to get a visa for Canada as well, especially for Nigerians. I was offered a cancer-bioinformatics postdoctoral position at Memorial University in St John’s, and I’ve been waiting 11 months so far for my visa to be approved. I just want to find the best place to do my science.

In 2020, as I was finishing my PhD at the University of Oxford, UK, studying ion channels, membrane transport and disease, I didn’t really consider applying for positions in the United States for a number of reasons.

For one thing, Europe is geographically closer to Thailand, which makes getting home not as arduous for me as it would have been had I moved across the Atlantic.

I spent a few days at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, during PhD interviews in 2017. Although it looked like a fun and inspiring place, I did experience a sudden, odd, unsafe feeling, especially when students mentioned that it was best not to live too far from campus for safety reasons.

The university provided a shuttle bus to take you from student housing to the university, but I preferred to live in a place where you can walk at night without concerns or the expense of a taxi. My other concern was healthcare costs, because students and postdocs in the United States typically get minimum levels of insurance coverage.

In the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, I’ve had to pay only minimal surcharges for any health issue.

I began my post-doctorate in October last year. Next year, ideally, I plan to start looking for tenure-track assistant-professor positions, but if I can’t find anything I’ll look for a second postdoc.

Earlier this year, after attending the Biophysical Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco, California, I thought about applying to universities in that state because the weather is amazing and it seemed like it could be a good fit.

But the rent sounds atrocious and doesn’t match well with a postdoc’s salary. I also found the level of homelessness there disturbing. I have also considered applying to laboratories in Ithaca, New York, as well as in Chicago, Illinois and St Louis, Missouri, large cities with notable gun violence. Given news stories of hate crimes against Asians, my family and I agree that safety is the biggest factor to consider.

I think back to the early twentieth century, when people who pursued science did so with their own money and out of sheer curiosity or their love (or madness) for the subject. I think we’re going back to science being essentially a hobby pursued by people who can afford to do research. But even if you are doing science as a hobby, you don’t want to worry about your health-care or childcare costs. In many European countries, those things are often provided or subsidised, those are on the table for you.

As I was finishing my PhD at the University of Otago in 2021, I did think about looking for a postdoc outside New Zealand. But, to be honest, I didn’t even consider the United States.

One of the biggest concerns for me, because I have a family to consider, is gun violence. I’m aware that we see only a particular media representation, but every time the United States is in the news, it seems as if it’s because of mass shootings. That is baffling to me, coming from New Zealand. We banned semi-automatic weapons and constructed a buy-back programme in 2019, following a mass shooting in Christchurch. I have very rarely seen a person carrying a gun, and I feel as if it would be a big culture shock.

Other political events are equally disconcerting. The June 2022 US Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and a national right to abortion is terrifying to see, as is the rolling back of transgender rights.

As someone who leans to the left politically, I find the US leftist parties are still pretty conservative in their social policies compared with New Zealand and the rest of the world – although I was glad to see the administration of President Joe Biden moves towards open-access science and forgiveness of student-loan debt.

Most of the postgraduates in New Zealand who head abroad go to Australia, the United Kingdom or European Union countries. I don’t have a perception that the United States is considered a more coveted place to study, nor do I think others here would buy into the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’. I would consider going to a US-based conference, but I haven’t travelled much in recent years owing to the pandemic.

I was troubled watching the US pandemic response from the side-lines. It wasn’t just the lack of measures to address the pandemic, it was the complete inability to follow the science. We had people in New Zealand protesting against mandates for vaccines or wearing masks, but they were in the clear minority. Yet US society’s reaction – ‘my personal inconvenience is more important than your health’ –  was horrifying.

• A Nature report