Reviews: Ghost Walkers: Southern and Eastern Europeans at the US–Canada Border in the Interwar Period
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current immigration debates in the Americas often concern issues of illegality, deportation, and border control mostly focusing on the US-Mexican border, and frequently labeling immigrants as undesirables, criminals, and potential threats to society.In her engaging book, Ashley Johnson Bavery shows us that such debates are not entirely new but fit into a longer narrative of US immigration control, nativism, suspicion as well as have clear roots in the 1920s and the experience of southern and eastern European immigrants looking for better opportunities in the new world.Scrutinizing events and trends taking place one hundred years ago, Bavery demonstrates how ethnic Europeans were stigmatized as likely burdens on society, criminals, illegals, and even terrorists, which led to harsh living and working conditions, discrimination, and exclusion, also due to a combination of local, national, and international decisions and policies.Between the 1870s and 1920s more than twenty million people immigrated to the United States, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe, during the era often referred to as the period of New Immigration.Such a wave had a major economic, social, and cultural impact on the receiving country as well as the newly arriving immigrants and their home societies.The era did not only bring about unprecedented immigration rates, but also growing attempts at control, restriction, selection, and testing, which ultimately manifested themselves in the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the introduction of a literacy test (1917), and culminated in quota limitations clearly targeted against immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in 1921 and 1924.Simultaneously with the introduction of these quotas, Canada remained relatively open.(Johnson Bavery could have devoted perhaps a bit more attention to the examination of the reasons behind the different attitudes of the two countries.)Consequently, European immigrants saw Canada both as a possible new destination and also as an (illegal) springboard to the US, eventually leading to shifting patterns of arrival, smuggling, and varied attitudes of, and towards, newly arriving immigrants.Most of the works on European immigration focus on the decades preceding the 1920s, studying questions of integration, nativism, assimilation,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".