FREEING MIGRATION FROM THE STATE: MICHAEL TREBILCOCK ON MIGRATION POLICY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michael Trebilcock's The Law and Economics of Immigration Policy sets out a broad prescriptive model for migration policy. It is informed by a classically liberal endorsement of free movement of labour, a commitment to efficiency, and a preference for market over state regulation. Trebilcock claims that his policy proposal will significantly liberalize immigration in prosperous liberal democratic states and be politically palatable. The key lies in pre-empting the objection that increased levels of immigration will impose or exacerbate the negative fiscal impact of immigrants on receiving states. Trebilcock would privatize selection by delegating it entirely to the market (employers) or the family (relatives), and institute a mandatory private insurance scheme payable by sponsors to insure against the risk that an immigrant will impose fiscal burdens on the state in the period leading up to eligibility for citizenship. While applauding the objective animating this proposal, the author relies partly on Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock's historical account in The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy to challenge its viability. First, the author suggests that Trebilcock's claim that his model is politically pragmatic is predicated on a contestable understanding of the nature of political opposition to immigration. Second, it is not obvious that Trebilcock's model, on its own terms, would actually liberalize immigration across the range of states where he would seek to implement it. The author concludes by reflecting on the capacity of broadly conceived, transnational policy prescriptions to grapple with the complexity of migration as a global phenomenon, the specificity of national contexts, and the limits on state actors' ability to socially engineer the character of present and future generations through immigrant selection. Where the vast majority of immigrants are admitted on the basis of ascriptive kinship criteria, family matters – and will continue to matter – in the future direction of immigration.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".