Temporary Families? the Parent and Grandparent Sponsorship Program and the Neoliberal Regime of Immigration Governance in Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian government has introduced a series of policy changes to various immigration programs since 2008. This paper focuses on the revamping of the parent and grandparent (PGP) sponsorship program and the introduction of new measures such as the Super Visa. Using Foucauldian analytical tools and drawing on Bacchi’s (2009, 2012) method of studying policy as problematizations, we first historicize the problematization of the family in immigration policy. Second, we refute the government’s representation of immigration under the PGP program problems as essentially a transparent “problem of math,” that of too many applicants overwhelming the system. Finally, we analyze neoliberal technologies of immigration governance and their impact on citizenship formation and struggles. Who counts as family, we argue, has been biopolitically determined in Canadian immigration policy. Family members are recognized as such when it suits the needs of the state. The latest changes in family sponsorship policies objectify potential parents and grandparents reunification applicants, seeing them as human liabilities that pose risks to the Canadian population because of their advanced age. The new measures deploy a neoliberal regime of governance that discriminatorily responsibilizes the family, marketizes regulation, and maximizes the state’s control of the border and of the population.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it