Policing Canada’s Refugee System: A Critical Analysis of the Canada Border Services Agency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The officers of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) play pivotal roles at various stages in Canada’s refugee system, making decisions that are life-changing for asylum seekers. This article examines the evolving institutional setting and processes that define the CBSA’s enforcement policy and its consequences for asylum seekers in Canada. Drawing on the findings of field-research, conducted between October 2015 and May 2018 in three Canadian provinces (Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec), it argues that the Agency operates in a specific social universe heavily shaped by the post-9/11 geopolitical context of the criminalization of migration. This situation has been exacerbated by the major overhaul of Canada’s refugee system, undertaken by the previous Conservative government in 2012. The article further contends that the way the CBSA has been involved in refugee status determination turns Canada’s refugee system into an adversarial and unfair process for some groups of asylum seekers. To that end, it highlights the CBSA’s policies in three areas: eligibility determination, front-end security screening of refugee claimants, and ministerial interventions at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".