Chronicle of a “crisis” foretold: Asylum seekers and the case of Roxham Road on the Canada-US border
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Irregular crossings at the Canada-US border between 2017 and 2019 made headlines and pervaded political debates. Drawing on the literature on the instrumentalization of migration crises and on the disappearance of asylum in Canada, this article interrogates the “crisis” framing of these arrivals. We argue that, at its core, this framing builds on the incremental erasure of asylum seekers as a legal and political reality from the Canadian public sphere over the last three decades. During this period and leading up to 2017, there was a shift in the public understanding of asylum from an international obligation to a problem that had been dealt with and erased. When this “problem” resurfaced in 2017, it shattered the illusion. Over the past two decades, Canada and the United States have created a hostile border architecture that channels migrants towards a narrow section of the Quebec-New York border known as Roxham Road. This generated pressures on Quebec's migrant settlement resources, providing the elements for a framing of these arrivals as a “crisis” and paving the way for the implementation of exceptional measures within a very tight framework, with massively expanded budgets, and with the participation of a range of public and private actors at times unfamiliar with the international protection system and unprepared to meet the needs of asylum seekers. The discussion concludes with an examination of two main legacies of the Roxham Road events: the articulation of a Canada-specific form of border humanitarianism and the solidification of an old policy aspiration – the elimination of the agentic asylum seeker.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.082 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".