Platform Borderlands: Transnational Labor Regime Imaginaries among Chinese-Speaking Gig Workers in the United States

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 9. Digitalization & Transnationalism

Abstract

This study investigates the digital platform ecologies and survival strategies of Chinese-speaking gig workers in California and New York amid an unprecedented wave of asylum migration since 2021. Using both onsite and virtual ethnography, it examines how this emerging workforce navigates and reshapes platform-based labor through transnational infrastructures of media, migration, and care. Our analysis, rooted in community organizing, shows how workers develop a comparative labor consciousness by juxtaposing their previous employment experiences in China, the United States, and, occasionally, in transit countries. This comparison creates distinct imaginaries of global labor hierarchies that guide how they interpret fairness, control, and value. Additionally, workers’ livelihoods are maintained through a hybrid cross-border media ecology, spanning Chinese social media, instant messaging apps, payment tools, ethnic info sites, and offline brokerage networks, that mediates access to work and fosters new forms of sociality and resistance. This transnational assemblage facilitates new migrants’ entry into the gig economy while reinforcing a hegemonic vision of racial and platform capitalism. By tracing these processes, the study challenges algorithm-centric and color-blind perspectives of gig work, highlighting how digital infrastructures, border regimes, and moral economies collectively reproduce labor hierarchies while maintaining daily solidarities within immigrant communities.

Authors

• Haoju Lu, CUNY

• Zoe Zhao, University of California-Santa Cruz