Tolerated, threatening and celebrated: How Canadian news media frames temporary migrant workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Immigration scholars have long observed that migrant workers are paradoxically both welcomed and deemed threatening within the nation state. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which mainstream media outlets reinforce these perceptions. Using critical discourse analysis, we analysed 561 articles in three mainstream newspapers to ascertain the various discourses used to describe migrant workers and migrant work. Our analysis specifically found that a cluster of ‘hiring scandals’ led to an increase in coverage on migrant work, and affected the types of discourses used in reference to migrant workers. Prior to these scandals, migrant work generated minimal media coverage. Ultimately, we find that migrant workers are deemed tolerable to the nation‐state at certain time periods, deemed as threats in other time periods, and, in the current moment of the global health crisis, are deemed absolutely essential. Migrant workers are thus only 'conditionally included' in the state.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".