Adam M. McKeown . Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders.<i>(Columbia Studies in International and Global History.)</i>New York : Columbia University Press . 2008 . Pp. xii, 450. $32.50.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Weaving through studies of migration, law, bureaucracy, international statecraft, and philosophy, this book steers an ambitious course across a broadly conceived mapping of the global replication of the American system of border control from the mid-eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Adam M. McKeown builds upon the pioneering scholarship of Erika Lee in At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (2003), Mae M. Ngai in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004), and other Asian American historians to elucidate how ideologies of race and inequality, individual rights, and national sovereignty that were developed through the passage and enforcement of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act came to set the standards for restrictions on immigration globally. McKeown provides a longer and broader context for the U.S. Congress's 1882 decision to bestow lesser rights of entry, legal protection, and citizenship on Chinese due to their perceived racial inferiority. He traces competing voices in a largely European conversation that weighed the rights of individuals, free intercourse, and conceptions of sovereignty and that tipped in favor of protecting national interests through heightened regimes of restriction. American experiments in enforcing the Chinese exclusion laws—including an expanding and increasingly discriminatory array of strategies to address persistent illegal immigration and its burgeoning complications—evolved into the institutional foundations of border enforcement around the world as practiced today. Almost concurrently with the United States, nations emerging from the white settler frontiers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa engaged in parallel conclusions regarding the need to safeguard against “unfree” Asian labor, although they chose different legal and administrative tools to achieve these goals. In contrast to the high costs and many failings of the U.S. exclusion laws and their unenforceability, Australian literacy tests efficiently granted almost complete autonomy to bureaucrats to determine entry rights under laws that superficially appeared egalitarian.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".