Immigrant IT Workers' Experiences With Remote Work: Temporal, Spatial, and Ideological Dimensions of Paid/Unpaid Work and Care

Abstract

This article examines immigrant IT workers' experiences with remote work. Through interviews with 21 immigrant IT employees, I find that remote work is used to bridge care/work obligations. Bridging occurs spatially, for example, when working from home enables family members to return to countries of origin for extended periods of time. And bridging occurs ideologically, by enabling remote workers to enact gendered self‐concepts that may be otherwise challenging to achieve. For women, this means they can maintain focus on paid work, while for men, it means engaging in involved fatherhood by taking on more childcare duties. These findings enhance the social shaping of technology perspective by delineating immigrants' gendered relationships with ICT‐mediated remote work, and the intricacies of time use. While ICT‐mediated remote work is conferred on individual employees, it is used to allocate a variety of (unpaid) care relations, both intra‐ and inter‐household. Remote work is not merely an individual‐level experience, and preferences for and against it may be incidental, in the case of immigrants. Rather it is necessary for many to bridge care/work gaps shaped by immigrants' experiences.