The "Threat" of Marriage Fraud: A Story of Precarity, Exclusion, and Belonging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Migrants can obtain permanent residency in Canada under the family-reunification category set out in s. 12(1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA). Canadian citizens or permanent residents may apply to sponsor their non-citizen spouse, common law or conjugal partner, or other relatives to move to Canada pursuant to s. 117(1)(a) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations (IRPR). The bad-faith clause under s. 4(1) of the IRPR requires spousal-sponsorship applicants to prove to visa officers that, on a balance of probabilities, their relationship is “genuine” and not “entered into primarily for the purpose of acquiring any status or privilege under the [IRPA]”. The bad-faith clause is meant to prevent so-called marriage fraud: the idea that migrants, hoping to take advantage of the family-reunification regime, trick vulnerable Canadians into marriage and then subsequently abandon them once they have obtained citizenship status. Drawing on the work of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial scholars, this paper argues that the construction of marriage fraud as a threat to national security rationalizes an increasingly exclusionary spousal-sponsorship regime post 9/11. Focusing on this “threat” detracts from the insidious naturalization of the neo-liberal, hetero-patriarchal, and white settler–colonial values that animate the exclusionary nature of family class migration—values that pre-date the recent moral panic over marriage fraud. This paper concludes by sounding a cautionary bell: Canadians must be wary of the ongoing reproduction and sedimentation of exclusionary values that give meaning to legal constructions of family because they reinforce and perpetuate experiences of precarity among migrants who live on the underside of global capitalism.
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 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 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.061 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".