This year will be the fourth year that my family will celebrate Thanksgiving without my grandfather, Yankel. It’s safe to say that Thanksgiving was his favorite holiday: Sitting at a table groaning under the otherworldly quantity of food, surrounded by his children and successful, Americanized grandchildren, he would raise toast after toast to this great country, his eyes moist with gratitude that America opened its rich embrace to him and his progeny.

This year, after Obama’s executive immigration order, more than four million people might have the same impulse as my late grandfather. Even if the embrace proves temporary, it wouldn’t be a bad toast: Thanksgiving, after all, is the holiday of the immigrant, down to the very first Europeans who waded ashore centuries ago.

This year, in part because of my grandfather’s acutely felt absence and in part because the immigration debate rages on, I consider how my family got to these shores ourselves.

Back in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was just starting to let out its persecuted Jewish minority and the United States was starting to accept them, my father’s cousin’s cousin arrived in Maryland. Then, in 1988, when the Soviet Union coughed up its next batch of Jews, that cousin brought over her cousin, just as my parents were applying for refugee status back in Moscow. The cousin happened to be my father’s cousin, and once she got to Maryland, she became my family’s guarantor as well as the guarantor of some other relatives. We arrived, pale and dazzled, on April 28, 1990, and also settled in Maryland. Then my father wrote to our local congressman, Ben Cardin, and asked to be reunited with my father’s older sister, her husband, their two kids, and my father’s retired parents. Then my father pulled over his aunt and her son, Boris. By this point, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and all the dozen relatives my father’s cousin had been a guarantor for pulled over their own families, and they pulled in their own. By the middle of the 1990s, some 60 people who were of some blood or marital relationship to me lived within a 15-mile radius of the house my parents bought, with their cherry-red Toyota Corolla (bought new!) parked out front.

These days, when I hear the conservative mantra that people ought to come to America legally and follow the law and get in line, I wonder what, exactly, they’re talking about. My family—by that I mean, the dozens listed above—all came here legally, but we weren’t exactly part of the immigration system nor did we follow any law on the books. We were refugees, and refugees are usually counted outside the elaborate visa system that everyone agrees is broken. In fact, usually they’re let in by presidential diktat.