‘We all know the benefits of having our parents and grandparents here with us’: super visas, temporary grand/parent migration, and Canadian nation building

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.