Immigration Bureaucrats and the Development of the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) in relation to a growing literature on bureaucrats’ role in immigration policy making, while challenging interpretations of the agreement as a “Europeanization” of Canadian policy. Canada is a prototypical liberal “migration state” that balances economic considerations, national security, rights and broader cultural concerns through its immigration regime. We open the “black box” of the state to examine how bureaucratic decision making informed the development of Canada’s asylum system. Drawing on interviews, archival materials and government documents, we show bureaucrats simultaneously sought to manage asylum backlogs and ensure compliance with international obligations while countering advocacy group opposition. The STCA reflects a uniquely Canadian approach to balancing competing imperatives in refugee policy, highlighting the role of bureaucrats in shaping immigration policy within domestic and international constraints. This research contributes to understanding the historical development of migration control policies in liberal democracies.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".