Moral Panic and Embodied Threat: The Discourse on Criminal Deportation and Youth Experiences of Violence in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bill C-43: Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act enacts changes to deportation policy that can be expected to intensify the threat of deportation for racialized youth, their families and communities members, and to exacerbate existing social divisions in Canada. This paper argues that these changes to Canadian deportation policy advance to new heights the criminalization and alienation of Blackness while maintaining a national mythology of a benevolent and humanitarian nation. This paper conducts a critical discourse analysis of the major House of Commons political debates on Bill C-43, which adapts and applies the moral panic framework and folk devil figure from Hall and others (1978), revealing the ways in which they are employed within the Canadian discourse on deportation. The debate is analyzed in light of an extensive literature review that explores the history of criminalization of immigrants and prior deportation legislation in Canada. This analysis reveals how prominent tropes of the benevolent and multicultural Canadian state, and the demonized figure of the criminal immigrant are invoked across party lines to reignite a moral panic around immigrant criminality. By bringing together activist and academic anti-racist and anti-oppressive theory, the paper opens new pathways to understanding the complex socio-historical factors that operate within and emerge from these debates. It puts this discussion in conversation with an interdisciplinary archive including diasporic thought and critical prison studies, which usefully analyze the interconnectedness of racism, incarceration, and displacement, an analysis which I extend to deportation. In addition, critical border studies are mobilized to locate the criminalization of immigrants in the context of the restriction of Canadian borders. Building on the work of McKittrick (2006) on Black geographies, the paper coins the concept of "alienation" to describe the psychic and physical displacement experienced by racialized subjects in Canada, through social, cultural and political dispossession, incarceration, and finally deportation. Grounded in the socio-historical context of colonization, conquest and racist immigration policy, this work destabilizes the national mythology that displaces and criminalizes Blackness in Canada by tracing the roots of systemic violence in the Canadian nation state and unsettling it as the basis of permanent removal of racialized subjects from national borders.
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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 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.071 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| 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".