Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882-1930. By Patrick Ettinger. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. xii, 244 pp. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-292-72118-0.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Patrick Ettinger's Imaginary Lines is an examination of immigration controls and undocumented immigration at the U.S. southern and northern borders. At the heart of Ettinger's analysis is an exploration of human agency and the ways Chinese, European, and later, Mexican immigrants entered the United States illegally despite the presence of an immigration bureaucracy designed to exclude. Ettinger places his study at the juncture of two contradictory tensions that helped define the U.S. southern and northern borders almost since their delineation: while substantial border controls were well in place by the late 1890s, fluidity of movement prevailed through the early 1930s. Imaginary Lines begins by tracing the relationship between the mid-nineteenth-century nativist movement and its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century corollary. As Ettinger deftly shows, early American immigration policy (1840s–1880s) was wedged between state and federal jurisdiction and fraught with inconsistencies. Yet there was little doubt that immigration policy favored propertied and productive immigrants over poor and dependent newcomers. Although immigration restrictions barred prostitutes, paupers, contract laborers, and the Chinese at maritime ports of entry, immigrants traversed the land borders of Canada and Mexico and reached the United States almost unfettered. In Ettinger's estimation, early border-crossing activities directly led to the creation of the Bureau of Immigration in 1891 and circumscribed the way federal border controls endeavored to prevent illegal immigration well into the twentieth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".