'Mentally Defectives' Not Welcome: Mental Disability in Canadian Immigration Law, 1859-1927
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the history and language of Canadian immigration statues and House of Commons debates regarding immigrants with mental disabilities from the time of Confederation to the 1920s. This paper posits that a study of the historical language and legal frameworks regarding immigrants with mental "disorders" illuminates the myriad of social prejudices about mental disability that have persisted in Canada. The early 20th century laws and House of Commons debates indicate that the exclusion of immigrants with mental disabilities was a deliberate decision on the part of legislators to ensure the proper "character" of immigrants coming to Canada. This paper argues that the representation of mental disability in early immigration legislation, particularly in the context of the growing influence of the field of psychiatry, reveals the historical pervasiveness of social misunderstandings of mental disability.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it