The Parent and Grandparent Sponsorship Program Reforms : The Consequence of a Neoliberal Shift
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the formal enshrinement of Canada’s immigration objectives in the Immigration Act of 1976, Citizenship and Immigration Canada has been tasked with the responsibility of balancing the demands of the labour market and reuniting immigrant families. Policy changes in the 1990s suggest that neoliberal ideology, which promotes market economy principles, has become increasingly influential in the shaping of Canadian social policies and practices, and has had significant implications for immigration policy and admission trends (Arat-Koc, 1999). The prominence of neoliberal logic in immigration policy has resulted in the framing of immigrant value in terms of economic contributions. As a result, Family Class admissions have been the target of criticism, particularly sponsored parents and grandparents, who are absolved of meeting the point system criteria and are therefore perceived as having little ability to contribute to the economy (McLaren & Black, 2005). This paper explores the extent to which recent reforms to the parent and grandparent sponsorship program are a reflection of, and maintain, the prevailing neoliberal discourse that subordinates Family Class immigrants, especially parents and grandparents, conceiving of them as burdens to the state as opposed to contributing Economic Class entrants. This economic framework provides an incomplete picture of the contributions that sponsored parents and grandparents make to Canada. Furthermore, the insufficiency of empirical data supporting the claim that parents and grandparents are a potential burden on the state suggests that the recent reforms are an explicit expression of fear rather than fact (VanderPlaat, Ramos & Yoshida, 2011). This paper concludes with future research suggestions that lend themselves to redefining “contribution” to incorporate social, cultural, and indirect economic contributions, to provide a more nuanced conception of the value of sponsored parents and grandparents.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".