Lu, Wenjuan2025-05-242025-05-242025https://hdl.handle.net/1828/22307This dissertation investigates how parliamentarians reasoned Canada’s rights in immigration matters, including admission, exclusion, and deportation. I look at parliamentary debates over immigration from 1867 to 1977, with an eye to discerning the patterns of lawmakers’ thinking on the “right” question. My finding is that they developed multiple lines of reasoning over the decades. Critics and defenders shared some metalogics, including assumptions about Canada’s territorial ownership and its power over Indigenous peoples, international law, imperial policy and interest, and governing principle. In addition, critics mobilized citizenship right, and defenders reasoned with autonomy, the British North America Act, and sovereignty. Furthermore, to understand the historical significance of the “right” debates, I examine them in relation to Canada’s construction of its state sovereignty. Using an integrated analytical framework, I study how legislators’ modes of thinking intersected with Canada’s sovereignty project vis-à-vis Britain, the international society of sovereign states, and Indigenous nations. The integrated framework illuminates the ripple effects of lawmakers’ lines of reasoning and the cross-pollination of ideas amongst the three strands of Canada’s sovereignty enterprise. My argument is that in reasoning the “right” question, parliamentarians performed sustained conceptual labour that moved forward Canada’s braided sovereignty project.enAvailable to the World Wide Webimmigrationstate sovereigntyrightsparliamentary debatesCanadapolitical historyconstitutional historysettler colonialismThesis