The “Chinese Question” and the Canada–US Border, 1885: “Why don't Governor Squire send his troops to Semiahmoo to prevent the twelve or fifteen thousand pagans from crossing our borders from British Columbia?”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the significance of Chinese immigration on the formation of the Canada–US border during the fall of 1885. The fear of a flood of Chinese immigrants from Canada turned into a campaign to drive Chinese communities out of Washington Territory, as white workers sought to “enforce” the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882. In turn, developments in the United States caused Canadians to reexamine their own “Chinese Question” and the meaning of the Chinese Restriction Act 1885. For Chinese laborers in Canada, the growing significance of the Canada–US border in the debate over the “Chinese Question” only diversified migratory patterns and methods. This migratory diversification tested the parameters of both the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Chinese Restriction Act and pushed the application of the legislation into a new bureaucratic reality. By the end of 1885, the debate over the Chinese Question had forged a new Canada–US border.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".