Mediating Infrastructural Competence: How Organizations Support Migrants’ Hierarchy of Needs

When people migrate to the United States (US), they are met with a variety of different infrastructures—both social and technical—that they must learn to use. While numerous researchers have explored the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the migrant experience, the field knows much less about the sociotechnical practices of the complex network of organizations that support migrants during resettlement. We conducted an interview study with 13 individuals who work at migrant-serving organizations operating at many levels (e.g., federal, state, and our local community) to investigate this. Drawing on a conceptual lens that brings together infrastructure and infrastructural competence, intermediation, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we find that individuals who work at these organizations are mediating migrants’ infrastructural competencies at nearly every step in their hierarchy of needs, including: physiological, safety and security, love and belonging, and self-esteem. We explore what these practices of mediation reveal about migrant agency and begin to re-imagine sociotechnical infrastructures to better empower migrants and affirm their agency.