“Imposter-Children” in the UK Refugee Status Determination Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article describes and analyzes an emerging problematic in the asylum and immigration debate, which I cynically dub the “imposter-child” phenomenon. My preliminary exploration maps how the imposter-child relates to and potentially influences the politics and practices of refuge status determination in the United Kingdom. I argue that the “imposter-child” is being discursively constructed in order to justify popular and official suspicion of spontaneously arriving child asylum-seekers in favour of resettling refugees from camps abroad. I also draw connections between the discursive creation of “imposter-children” and the diminishment of welfare safeguarding for young people. Further complicating this situation is a variety of sociocultural factors in both Afghanistan and the United Kingdom, including the adversarial UK refugee status determination process, uncertainty around how the United Kingdom can“prove” an age, and a form of “triple discrimination” experienced by Afghan male youth. Through unearthing why the “imposter-child” is problematic, I also query why it is normatively accepted that non-citizens no longer deserve protection from the harshest enforcement once they “age out” of minor status.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".