“Patriotic Heroes” and “Foreign Laborers”: Politics of Media and Public Discourses on Essential Workers and Migrant Workers in Canada During the COVID-19
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During COVID-19, politicians and the media in North America spotlighted the contributions of essential workers. As many low-income essential services are performed by migrant workers, this study explores how the pandemic served as a critical moment to raise societal awareness of the disadvantaged circumstances faced by migrant workers and to garner public support for their rights and equality. Engaging with scholarly critiques of media representation of underprivileged migrant groups and migration and labor scholars’ work on migrant workers in Canada, the study examines mainstream media discourse and public discourse on essential workers and migrant workers in Canada during the pandemic. Adopting thematic and critical discourse analysis, the study reveals that nationalist ideology, intersected with capitalist and neoliberal ideologies, prevents the public from forming solidarity with migrant workers, although overt racist and xenophobic discourse diminishes, and advocacy voices begin to gain higher visibility in mainstream media. The study contends that mobilizing broader public support to tackle inequalities remains a crucial issue in the context of transnational labor migration.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.061 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| 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".