Temporal Governance, Immigrant Incorporation, and Asset Building in Platform Work

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 28. Beyond Employment

Abstract

Immigrant workers are central to app-based ride-hail and delivery work, and gig platforms often function as a practical route into paid employment when other options are constrained by credential recognition barriers, language constraints, or segmented labor markets (Katta et al. 2024). The International Labour Organization reports that migrants are 24.3 percent of platform workers in the United States, compared with 17.3 percent in off-platform work (ILO 2024). This paper argues that the incorporation consequences of platform labor hinge not only on earnings but also on temporal governance. Dispatch, incentives, ratings-based account risk, and opaque rule changes shape when work is viable and how costly it is to refuse, producing temporal inequality through unpaid waiting, app-mediated readiness, fragmented rest, sleep compression, and disrupted household routines. I ask how immigrant platform workers experience these forms of time control, how exposure is stratified by immigrant generation and caregiving configuration, and how temporal inequality shapes household asset building, including liquidity buffers, housing preparation, and business capitalization. Preliminary findings draw on a mixed-methods pilot in New England that combines American Time Use Survey analysis with 95 interviews and observation (López-Sanders 2025). A measurement puzzle emerges: under conventional time poverty thresholds, unincorporated self-employment appears least time-poor, yet first-generation immigrant platform workers describe chronic time scarcity driven by extended availability, unpaid waiting, and sleep compression, while second-generation workers more often report boundary-setting and part-time engagement. The paper contributes an immigrant-centered theory of temporal governance and shows how algorithmic time control links platform work to stratified incorporation and wealth trajectories.

Author

• Laura Lopez-Sanders, Brown University