The Privilege of Staying Home: COVID and the Highly Skilled Workforce

In her non-fiction opinion article “The Privilege of Staying Home: COVID and the Highly Skilled Workforce,” migration researcher Agnieszka Weinar questions the relationship between mobility, privilege, and migration. Traditionally, mobility has been a mark of privilege and wealth. However, Weinar posits that the pandemic has introduced immobility as a new privilege, one that allows the immobile to follow COVID restrictions and stay distant from risk during the lockdown. The liberty of working from home, for example, is limited to only 25% of workers in the US who have non-essential occupations that don’t require their presence on location. Weinar criticizes this paradoxical rise in the value of non-essential tech skills which uniquely positions those possessing them to adapt to remote work, thereby ensuring their safety, wealth, and job continuity in uncertain times. She also links the widespread commodification of technical skills to migration patterns, which show the growing popularity of international recruiting. She predicts that highly skilled immigration will be reduced because of a turn towards remote work, resulting in migration policies that primarily target low-skilled workers.

By framing immobility as a form of privilege, Weinar’s article challenges dominant COVID-19 narratives that valorize staying home, exposing the uneven distribution of safety and security during the pandemic. This reframing reveals how pandemic storytelling often obscures structural inequalities, particularly between those who can work remotely and essential workers who cannot. Weinar’s article illuminates the gap between those with the privilege of remaining immobile and essential workers, complicating the conventional understanding of mobility as a sign of wealth.