"Disappearing Refugees: Reflections on the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Refugees are vanishing from the territory of wealthy industrialized nations. I do not mean that refugees are literally disappearing. Despite the best efforts of western governments to deter them, thousands of asylum seekers do manage to arrive and lodge refugee claims each year. I refer here not to the legal and material reality of refugees, but rather to the erosion of the idea that people who seek asylum may actually be refugees. This dispiriting turn in public sentiment is enabled by a series of legal and popular conjunctions that produce what I call the discursive disappearance of the refugee. This erasure performs a crucial preparatory step toward legitimating actual laws and practices that attempt to make them vanish in reality. While such policies can never entirely succeed in preventing entry, they may reduce numbers, and they can and do consign a growing proportion of entrants to the illegal category. This article explores one such legal instrument designed to constrain the movement of asylum seekers, namely the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement (Agreement). The Agreement was negotiated by Canada and the United States as part of a package of post-9/11 measures, is presented as furthering security, and is modeled on the Dublin Convention (now the Dublin II Regulation) of the European Union. It requires asylum seekers to lodge their refugee claims in the first country of arrival. In other words, asylum seekers on the U.S. side of the border who are attempting entry into Canada will be deflected back to the United States and vice versa. I will use the preamble to the Agreement to illustrate how the legal text tacitly profits from the popular blurring of asylum seekers and illegals. I will also consider the extent to which the Agreement is likely to advance the principles and objectives attributed to it.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.071 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.026 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".