‘We all know the benefits of having our parents and grandparents here with us’: super visas, temporary grand/parent migration, and Canadian nation building
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transnational grand/parent migration is an essential source of care for many migrant families that often comes into conflict with legal, political, and economic dynamics shaping a state's rules for reunification. This article critically analyses neoliberal multicultural discourses of grand/parent immigration in Canadian parliamentary debates and committee proceedings around the ‘Super Visa’ programme from 2011 to 2021. Grand/parents are portrayed in the Hansard as indispensable care providers that enhance the social, emotional, cultural and economic lives of immigrant families. However, the ‘super visa’ renders grand/parents permanently temporary through its high sponsorship costs, long waiting times, perpetuation of visitor status and sponsor dependency. Neoliberal multicultural discourses simultaneously prioritise skilled economic immigration and characterise migrant grandparents as ‘risky’ burdens on social services. We map how these paradoxical constructions of sponsored grand/parents as ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ are used to celebrate grandparents’ contributions but also justify further restrictions to permanent grand/parent sponsorship via the family class. By shifting grand/parent immigration from permanent reunification to the super visa, we argue that these discourses obscure deficits in state provided services like childcare and immigrant integration, while also devaluing grand/parents’ care labour as ‘unproductive’, exposing how the state's multicultural values champion family reunification only insofar as it enables economic productivity.
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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 | 0.041 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".