Middle class nation building through a tenacious discourse on skills: immigration and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the discursive emphasis in post-1960s Canadian immigration policy on ‘skills’ in the context of adopting a formally race-neutral immigration policy, and embracing what has been called middle class nation building. Using policy documents and statistical information, it is argued that a clear preference for newcomers with ‘skills,’ has been sustained despite shifts in policy over time, because ‘skills’ serve as a floating signifier. The preference and morphing nature of ‘skills’ is exemplified in three distinct policy initiatives advanced by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau since assuming power in 2015: (1) the 2016–2017 Global Skills Strategy for temporary ‘skilled’ workers; (2) the Economic Mobility Pathways Project Canada undertook in partnership with UNHCR in 2018–2019 to facilitate the entry of ‘skilled’ refugees; and (3) COVID-19 pandemic developments which drew attention to ‘essential skills’ in services and care and facilitated a novel, albeit circumscribed, pathway to citizenship for some temporary workers and refugee claimants. Given Canada’s decades-long preference and global leadership in pursuing ‘skilled labour migration’ it is important to recognize the ways in which the legitimating of ‘skills’ amounts to a middle-class nation building that hides, and even reinforces, inequities in the Canadian and global contexts.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".