Canada’s Relationship with Women Migrant Sex Workers; Producing ‘Vulnerable Migrant Workers’ through “Protecting Workers from Abuse and Exploitation”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s immigration regulations and policy instructions, collectively known as ‘Protecting Workers from Abuse and Exploitation’ (PWAE), instruct visa officials not to process temporary work permits when there is suspicion that migrants may be at risk of sexual abuse or exploitation in industries related to sex work. The regulations are part of Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, located within an anti-trafficking initiative.\nStretching across disciplines and focusing on critical migration scholarship, this research uses a communications studies lens to unpack the power of categorization, and the dividing practices that produce, maintain and normalize inclusion and exclusion, through the conceptualization of the nation. Anchored in the theories of Foucauldian governmentality and feminist intersectionality, this thesis employs a feminist critical discourse analysis to unpack the text of the regulations, informed by semi-structured interviews with immigration officials and a migrant sex work advocate. Additionally, administrative data obtained by special request are examined to analyze the criteria that inform migrant refusals and the trends over time. The analyses reveal how PWAE is interpreted and applied, and explores what the consequences are for the populations most effected –women migrant workers.\nThe results of the research demonstrate that PWAE advances a governing strategy that prioritises surveillance of the sex industries, increases migration controls and immigration enforcement. PWAE provides the Canadian state with the legal grounds to exclude undesirable women migrants from the Canadian community, discipline migrant actions and choices, police their presence in Canada and detain and deport them with ease. This securitization agenda exacerbates precarious working and living conditions for migrants in the Canadian sex industries and curtails mobility of women migrant workers, while allowing the Canadian state to maintain a benevolent and positive image as the protectors of Canadian population and of ‘vulnerable foreign workers’.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.065 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".