Narrowing the Gap by Widening the Conflict: Power Politics, Symbols of Sovereignty, and the American Vietnam War Resisters' Migration to Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I consider how a second face or dimension of covert political power was used to deny legal immigration status to Vietnam War military resisters who sought refuge in Canada during the early years of the largest politically motivated migration since the American Revolution. Recently declassified historical records and interviews with former politicians and administrators reveal that the Canadian Immigration Department and its minister misled the public in advancing an official myth about the evolution of this migration. Until successfully exposed by persistent and innovative investigative journalism, the backstage use of political power kept American Vietnam military resisters who were seeking to legally immigrate defensively framed in a symbolic package that defined them as culturally unsuitable. Several thousand American military resisters lived illegally in Canada until conflict about their plight was successfully broadened and transformed into an effective collective grievance and claim under Canadian immigration law. Once the gap between Canadian immigration law and its practice was fully exposed, the conflict about this policy grew rapidly to include a number of cultural elite groups and a master framing of these American servicemen as unexpected symbols of Canadian sovereignty. A fully elaborated explanation of the collective transformation of sociolegal grievances into successful legal claims requires combined attention to the macrolevel interaction of political power and cultural symbolism.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".