The Case of the Waylaid Immigrant Inspector: Authority, Respectability, and Sexual Misconduct, 1921
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Drawing on a case file created on an immigrant inspector accused of sexual misconduct by an alien prostitute facing deportation in Detroit, this article traces the thorough investigation the US Immigration Service pursued when a serious allegation was made against one of its own. It presents the twists and turns of the investigation, reading transcripts of testimonies and internal correspondence between Detroit, Montréal, and Washington both along and against the grain. It argues that the case sheds critical light on how the Immigration Service understood respectable masculinity and the proper exercise of authority in the early 1920s. Due to the nature of their work, especially cases involving alleged “immoral” women and prostitutes, immigrant inspectors were supposed to embody the ideals of respectable middle-class masculinity, including order, moderation, and self-restraint. Improper sexual relations was a serious charge that challenged not only the reputation of the immigrant inspector, but also the Immigration Service more broadly.
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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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".