The Canadian Indian Free Passage Right: The Last Stronghold of Explicit Race Restriction in United States Immigration Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper discusses the little-known provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows Canadian Indians of 50% or more of the of the American race to cross the United States-Canada border free of visa and other immigration requirements. Through archival documents, the paper traces the origins of the right through the 1794 Jay Treaty between the United States and Great Britain to a statute passed by Congress in 1928. The paper discusses the interpretation of the 1928 statute by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which first applied a political definition of the term Indian based on Canadian law, then shifted to a racial definition based on American naturalization law. Finally, the paper discusses the 1952 amendment to the statute, which added the blood quantum requirement, and reveals the reasons why a racial definition was added at the same time American immigration law generally moved beyond racial distinctions to control entry to the United States. Based on this discussion, the paper analyzes the implications of the provision for current concerns in federal law and immigration law over racial classifications. Noting that Congress' authority over law and immigration law both depend on historically unfettered plenary power, the paper suggests that the Canadian statute might be used to distinguish other statutes defining American Indians by blood quantum and to challenge the Supreme Court's exemption of racial immigration provisions from equal protection review.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".