If you believe that I have some beachfront property for you in Utah.

All that by way of introduction. In that scenario, Canada was in a postwar boom and looking for large numbers of immigrants, and had a place for them in the economy. My grandfather had to have secured a job offer in advance. Most of these immigrants came from Europe, but many came from Britain in particular — a country to which Canada had the deepest historical ties, with which Canada had been part of a constitutional and international-law unit until 1931, and with which Canada had shared a citizenship until 1947 — although the Dominions could always exercise immigration controls against Britain even when not independent; Canada had done so for generations. Yet the British were required to go through the same procedures as everyone else and, above all, “family reunification” extended to the nuclear family of the worker being admitted and no one else.

It never seemed to have occurred to anyone that one should be able to make the momentous decision to move to a new country to settle, and then be able to import siblings, parents, cousins, whomever. My mother immigrated in her 20s to marry my father. There were provisions for people marrying a Canadian, then as now, but she had to be accepted on medical and employability grounds all the same. It never seemed to occur to anyone, my mother least of all, that she should be able to import my maternal grandparents or her sibling and his family, nor would it have occurred to them to ask.

Time was, one made the decision to improve one’s lot by migration and never saw or spoke to one’s elder family again. My grandparents in Britain not having a phone of their own for the longest time; my mother communicated by letter. Didn’t see or speak to them regularly for many years, and this was the 1970s.

I suppose “Family Reunification” seems like such an American concept to me. Interesting to learn it was, essentially, a failed legislative scam.

Bigger questions: given the assumptions Feighan was relying on — I have to assume the Administration people were lying and playing him — how did family reunification have the result it did? Just a statistical result of incremental increases in the non-white population that was admitted over time?