The Construction of Migrant Work and Workers by Alberta Legislators, 2000-2011
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper uses narrative analysis to explore how Alberta government Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) “constructed” migrant work and migrant workers in legislature and media statements between 2000 and 2011. Government MLAs asserted that migrant work (1) was economically necessary and (2) posed no threat to Canadian workers. Government MLAs also asserted that international migrant workers (3) had questionable occupational, linguistic or cultural skills and (4) caused negative social and economic impacts in Canada. Taken individually, these narratives appear contradictory, casting migrant work as good but migrant workers as bad. Viewed together, these narratives comprise an effort to dehumanize temporary and permanent international migrant workers. This (sometimes racialized) “othering” of migrant workers justifies migrant workers’ partial citizenship and suppresses criticism of their poor treatment. Cet article utilise l’analyse narrative pour explorer comment les membres du gouvernement de l’Assemblée législative de l’Alberta (députés) ont « construit » le travail des migrants et des travailleurs migrants avec leur déclarations dans la législature et les médias entre 2000 et 2011. Les députés du gouvernement ont affirmé que le travail migrant (1) était nécessaire économiquement et (2) ne représentait aucune menace pour les travailleurs canadiens. Les députés du gouvernement ont également affirmé que les travailleurs migrants internationaux (3) avaient des compétences professionnelles, linguistiques ou culturelles douteuse et (4) avaient des impacts négatifs sociaux et économiques au Canada. Pris individuellement, ces récits semblent contradictoires, décrivant le travail migrant comme bon, mais les travailleurs migrants comme mauvais. Prises ensemble, ces récits constituent un effort pour déshumaniser les travailleurs migrants internationaux temporaires et permanents. Cette « altérisation » (parfois racialisé) des travailleurs migrants justifie la citoyenneté partielle des travailleurs migrants et supprime la critique de leur mauvais traitement.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".