“Heaven without people is not worth going to”: refugee resettlement, time, and the institutionalization of family separation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine how resettlement as an institution, shaped by temporal opportunities and constraints over the lifespan, perpetuates refugee family separation. Based on seven years of qualitative research with households resettled through Canada’s Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative (SRRI), we show how the forced transition to nuclear family structures left almost no families arriving with extended households intact, leading to immediate negative impacts on self-reported well-being. Over time, we observed three outcomes of prolonged family separation. First, most families remained obstructed from reunification by the state in what we term unresolved protracted separation. Second, a minority secured partial negotiated reunification within the resettlement state through private sponsorship. Finally, another small group pursued next-generation reunification by arranging marriages for older children with left-behind kin outside the resettlement state. These responses reflect refugees’ adaptation to restrictive reunification policies amid declining family and humanitarian admissions and a growing privatization of immigration policy.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".