>How porous, you ask? Porous enough that my paternal grandmother was
>not aware until a couple of years ago that she had in fact been
>Canadian the whole time. When the border controls tightened and
>passports became required to get back into the US again, she and my
>grandfather applied for same; the State Department came back to her
>and said, in essence, "What are you asking us for, lady? You were
>born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick."

Assuming at least one of your great-grandparents were also American citizens, tho, (which may or may not be true, I obviously would not know) that really shouldn't have made a difference. Your grandmother could have been born on the Moon and she'd still have been American.

>Amazingly, this did NOT turn
>into a ten-year odyssey of bureaucratic wrangling with the Social
>Security Administration et al., none of whom had evidently
>noticed that interesting fact before the passport people started
>digging around; instead, even the notoriously tetchy U.S. immigration
>people appear to have gone, "Oh, what the hell, forget it" and stamped
>everything. She did have to sign a thing saying she wouldn't support
>Canada in the event of a war. :)

This doesn't happen so much to those of us who live in states with great huge bodies of water forming our border with Canada, but I've heard tell it isn't uncommon out west as well, especially since there are places in northern Minnesota where the precise position of the border has only been clarified fairly recently and there was a long tradition of the local authorities regarding that whole "citizenship" thing fairly laconically.

My memory is fuzzy, but I seem to recall the US and Canada agreeing, both formally and informally, to make it as painless as possible for everyone involved to sort things out, as nobody had a real interest in seeing nice white people with no discernible accents being denied social security benefits or being tearfully deported on the evening news.

>On the plus side, now I can give my father shit about having been an
>illegal immigrant's anchor baby.

Oh man, that's always fun. I give my Dad shit about being the son of a lifelong union man and shop steward. He hates it when I remind him of that.

-Merc
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