The U.N. Refugee Convention in the U.S. and Canada: Substantive Benefits, or Just Lip Service?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an era of mass migration, asylum procedures have come under new scrutiny. In this paper, I will look at the origins of the United Nations Refugee Convention, compare its implementation today in the United States and Canada, and analyze how well (or poorly) the American and Canadian systems comport with the Convention’s requirements. After discussing some substantive differences in American and Canadian asylum and refugee law, I will then turn to some of the procedural differences between the systems, which have less high-profile but often equally significant impacts on the lives of people seeking recognition as refugees. I will also discuss a few points of strength and areas of opportunity for growth in the systems, focusing in particular on a few lessons that the United States might be able to learn from its neighbor to the north.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| 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".