“Slavery hasn’t ended, it has just become modernized”: Border Imperialism and the Lived Realities of Migrant Farmworkers in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Border imperialism is a powerful framework for understanding the ways that colonial states manage borders in order to restrict movement of migrants and secure neoliberal economic interests. The present commentary, based on research carried out in British Columbia, Canada, utilizes ethnographic data to highlight the impacts of border imperialism on the everyday lives of temporary migrant farmworkers. First, I discuss how Mexican and Caribbean migrants’ lives are impacted by displacement from farms in their ‘home’ countries. Next, I provide an overview of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and argue that it (along with other circular migration schemes) is a powerful weapon of border imperialism designed to construct migrant precarity and uphold deeply-held notions of “Canadianness.” Finally, I discuss the racialization and criminalization of migrant farm workers and present workers’ testimonials to demonstrate how these processes result in migrants’ exclusion from the nation-state and local communities. Ultimately, I argue that scholars and activists struggling for migrant justice must center the demands of workers in their activism.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".