Bordering the Constitution, Constituting the Border
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is an established principle in Canadian law that refugees present at or within Canada’s borders are entitled to basic constitutional protection. Where precisely these borders lie, however, is far from clear. In this article, I examine the Canadian border as a site at which to study the constitutional entitlements of refugees. Through an analysis of the Multiple Borders Strategy (MBS)--a broad strategy that re-charts Canada’s borders for the purposes of enhanced migration regulation--I point to a basic tension at play in the border as site. I argue that the MBS imagines and enacts the border in two fundamentally different ways. On one hand, it conceives of the border as a multiple, moving barrier that can be selectively positioned outside Canada’s territorial boundaries to expand state power outward. On the other hand and at the same time, it conceives of the border as a singular and static barrier positioned at the edge of Canadian territory and asserts this as the “actual” border. By simultaneously conceiving of the border in these two conflicting ways--and maintaining that Canada’s extraterritorial borders are not its actual borders--the MBS frustrates a basic principle of Canadian constitutional law. It not only deprives refugees of constitutional protection but also, more fundamentally, of legal and constitutional recognition. To illuminate the legal and conceptual violence of the MBS, I turn to the work of Hannah Arendt on the “right to have rights.” By reference to Arendt’s work, I argue that the MBS not only re-charts Canada’s national boundary, it also alters the juridical relationships produced by that boundary and the rights and duties they prescribe. I conclude by advocating for better alignment between Canada’s constitutional commitments and its border laws and policies. I argue that to give meaning to the right to have rights within Canada’s constitutional framework and to ensure that those subject to the force of Canadian law may also benefit from its protection, Canada must ensure that wherever its legal borders go the constitution follows.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 it