Precarious Mobility and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Re-Examining Canada’s Migration-Security Nexus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is an understatement to express that the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the state of our world, with currently over 4 million confirmed deaths and over 200 million cases worldwide. One of the most predominantly impacted groups by the conditionalities of the coronavirus has been precarious status migrants, such as asylum seekers, refugees, and temporary foreign workers. The pandemic has triggered many securitized Western nation states to further fortify their borders. While citizenship regimes such as Canada claim to have an actively implemented “closed border policy”, the only individuals that have truly been systemically excluded from entering the country have been those with precarious status. This piece will revisit the Canadian migration-security nexus through a COVID-19 lens and will argue that the marginalization of precarious bodies and their mobility only reproduces the existing practices of the Canadian state to exclude refugees and migrants, using the pandemic as a justification to exercise exceptional power to securitize against them as the “undesirable” other.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".