Unguarded Border: American Émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War

By Donald W. Maxwell

The United States is accustomed to accepting waves of migrants who are fleeing oppressive conditions and political persecution in their home countries. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the flow of migration reversed as over fifty thousand Americans fled across the border to Canada to resist military service during the Vietnam War or to escape their homeland’s hawkish society. 
 
Unguarded Border tells their stories and, in the process, describes a migrant experience that does not fit the usual paradigms. Rather than treating these American refugees as unwelcome foreigners, Canada embraced them, refusing to extradite draft resisters or military deserters and not even requiring passports for the border crossing. And instead of forming close-knit migrant communities, most of these émigrés sought to integrate themselves within Canadian society. 
 
Historian Donald W. Maxwell explores how these Americans in exile forged cosmopolitan identities, coming to regard themselves as global citizens, a status complicated by the Canadian government’s attempts to claim them and the U.S. government’s eventual efforts to reclaim them. Unguarded Border offers a new perspective on a movement that permanently changed perceptions of compulsory military service, migration, and national identity. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978834040

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Cover: Unguarded Border, American Émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War by Donald W. Maxwell

UNGUARDED BORDER

WAR CULTURE

Edited by Daniel Leonard Bernardi

Books in this series address the myriad ways in which warfare informs diverse cultural practices, as well as the way cultural practices—from cinema to social media—inform the practice of warfare. They illuminate the insights and limitations of critical theories that describe, explain, and politicize the phenomena of war culture. Traversing both national and intellectual borders, authors from a wide range of fields and disciplines collectively examine the articulation of war, its everyday practices, and its impact on individuals and societies throughout modern history.

For a list of all the titles in the series, please see the last page of the book.

UNGUARDED BORDER

American Émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War

DONALD W. MAXWELL

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey London and Oxford

Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Maxwell, Donald William, author.

Title: Unguarded border : American émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War / Donald W. Maxwell.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2023] | Series: War culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022037745 | ISBN 9781978834033 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978834026 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978834040 (epub) | ISBN 9781978834057 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Draft resisters—United States. | Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Desertions—United States. | Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Protest movements—United States. | Americans—Canada—History—20th century. | Canada—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. | United States—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC DS559.8.D7 M39 2023 | DDC 959.704/3373—dc23/eng/20221220

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037745

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2023 by Donald W. Maxwell

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

rutgersuniversitypress.org

For my families of birth and of choice, for their unflagging support

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Escaping over the Border: The Americans Who Went to Canada

2 The Welcome Mat Is Spread All along the Border: How Americans Found Their Way to Canada

3 Religion and Politics at the Border: Canadian Church Support for American Vietnam War Resisters

4 Knowledge Has No National Character: Americans in Canadian Universities and the Movement of Ideas over the U.S.-Canada Border

5 These Are the Things You Gain If You Make Our Country Your Country: Defining Citizenship along the U.S.–Canada Border in the 1970s

6 American Vietnam War–Era É migr é s and the Blurring of Borders

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Rate of Population Moving to Canada, by State, 1966–1972

Notes

Bibliography

Index

UNGUARDED BORDER

INTRODUCTION

David W. Diamond graduated in the class of 1966 at Sherburne Central School in upstate New York. Like many young men of his generation, he went immediately to college. University life did not entirely suit him, however, and he was suspended during the middle of his sophomore year. He returned home to live with his parents, and although he attended a nearby community college, his life changed significantly.¹ For American men of Diamond’s generation, flunking out of college even once meant they no longer would enjoy a deferment from the military draft during the Vietnam War era. Unless they could prove themselves unfit or unworthy for military duty, they were subject to conscription.

Six months and two days after his suspension from college, Diamond reported for induction into the U.S. Army. He attended boot camp at Fort Knox in Kentucky, then went to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, for medical aid training. One year to the day after Diamond was suspended from college, the U.S. Army declared him AWOL (absent without leave). While on leave after the medical aid course, Diamond and two of his barracks mates began traveling to Sweden to resist being deployed to Vietnam. Sweden was granting asylum on humanitarian grounds to American GIs, primarily military deserters who had left their posts in Europe and Asia. In seeking the shortest route from San Antonio to Stockholm, Diamond found himself in Canada.² Diamond likely could not have gotten to Sweden easily, but he did not need a passport to get into many Western Hemisphere countries. Among those countries during the Vietnam War, Canada was the only one that openly accepted deserters from the U.S. military, such as Diamond and his barracks mates, and draft resisters—men who did not report for induction when ordered to do so.

Diamond remained in Canada for nine years. In a diary entry he wrote in Montréal in the spring of 1975, he revealed the psychological toll the first seven years in exile had taken on him, admitting,

I never have the nerve to go any where [sic] out of fear that there will be no place to return to. My father … tried to convince me that things never change that fast on the earth but I seem to have it in my psyche that things can indeed change as rapidly as all that and faster. I could come home to my apartment and find it gone at the end of a long day of school and work and worse[,] I could have no place to turn for help, with the only real outside alternative to go to the states and to jail.³

For Diamond and other American men of draft age in the 1960s and 1970s, security about a place to belong was under constant assault. They faced the possibility of being drafted, the possibility of being told by their nation to spend two years of their youth in military service, the possibility of being a combatant in a war reviled around the world, the possibility of being wounded or killed, the possibility of a prison sentence for draft evasion or desertion, the possibility of feeling compelled to live in the underground to avoid criminal prosecution, the possibility of exile, the possibility of being extradited and deported from places of exile, the possibility of renouncing U.S. citizenship to resist fulfilling some of its duties, and the possibility of the United States reclaiming them under various schemes of the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter presidencies. These myriad possibilities gnawed at the psyches of young American men for over a decade. Those who most successfully negotiated these assaults often did so by identifying places in which they could live their lives on their own terms, usually by leaving the United States. It was in Canada, reached by a rather easy border crossing, that they could most easily find spaces in which they could pursue cosmopolitan ideals removed from the nation, yet to which they had easy access in their day-to-day lives. This study uses the definition of cosmopolitanism posited by the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: when people want or need to belong to, or be accepted in, places they were not assigned to by the accident of birth, whether for economic, personal, or political reasons.⁴

Tens of thousands of people moved from the United States to Canada during the 1960s and 1970s. The number who were resisting the draft and deserting the military is difficult to pinpoint, because neither Canadian nor U.S. officials tallied people who cited such reasons for their immigration. Indeed, many émigrés feared that disclosure of their draft or military status would incriminate them. By taking up residency in another country, and in some cases renouncing their citizenship, U.S. émigrés pointed to new concepts of citizenship based less on the nation and more on the place from or to which they moved. The impact of the movement of émigrés was most felt in the places from which they left and in which they arrived, more so than the nations from which and to which they moved. Accordingly, this study focuses on individuals and grassroots efforts to aid (or hinder) their emigration from the United States to Canada.

Inescapable in the stories of these people is that they were still at the mercy of the laws of nations: immigration laws in both the United States and Canada and extradition laws of the rest of the world. Further, in the Vietnam War era, there was an ever-changing matrix of military conscription laws in the United States, laws designed to make more inclusive the United States’s intensive, decade-long demand for military personnel, and reflecting the varying attitudes of the Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter presidential administrations toward military service, resistance, and desertion. Consequently, this book emphasizes the stories of young American men of draft age who were subject to those laws. While this study includes elements of cultural, military, legal, political, and diplomatic history, it is, at its heart, a social history—an immigration history—of U.S. residents who moved to Canada during the Vietnam War era and the Canadians among whom they moved.

To call these people immigrants is to acknowledge that national borders were crossed. Until the early twenty-first century, when strict post-9/11 passport restrictions came into play, the U.S.-Canadian border was a relatively easy one to cross physically, if not emotionally. In the second half of the twentieth century, the border could be crossed via many forms of transportation over 150 legal highway, railroad, and ferry crossings and over 5,500 miles (8,900 kilometers) of largely unguarded border. U.S. émigrés in Canada who had resisted the draft or deserted the military demonstrated a diminished sense of allegiance to the nation. Once they reached Canada, they were also often ambivalent about their new country of residence, feeling little kinship with fellow U.S. émigrés, and not forming strong expatriate communities.

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In late 1974 David W. Diamond visited his parents at their home in upstate New York for the first time in six years, a visit that was legal due to a fifteen-day grace period during Gerald Ford’s Presidential Clemency Program. With the war over and hoping to lure exiles back to the United States to perform alternative service or to seek exoneration, Ford allowed men to return to the United States to discuss the possibilities with their families. Diamond was uncomfortable in his hometown and yet continued to feel like an outsider in Canada. He recognized the ambiguous place in which he resided, writing in his diary on New Year’s Day 1975,

Montreal isn’t home to me either but I am not so uncomfortable here for I am not in the position of being somebody to the people around me. Here I have no history, and that more than likely implies that I have no future here either, and having no history I have no family history and therefore I don’t have to act a part, don’t have to be so much a symbol of the ambitions and strivings of all the people in the family both past and present and don’t have to worry about being a disgrace; in this town no one cares because no one knows me.⁵

Many observers noted that U.S. émigrés did not seek each other out in Canada. A staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times newspaper observed in 1972 that émigrés were difficult to locate in Canada. As one twenty-six-year-old man acknowledged, We’re not glued together. We’re all different, have different interests. The only cohesive force is that of the mind, the reason we came here. But as for being a close group—draft dodgers and deserters all buddies, that sort of thing; it just does not exist.⁶ Michael Warsh, who immigrated to Vancouver in the late 1960s, noted that although émigrés gravitated toward immigrant aid groups when they arrived in Canada, they also quickly strayed away from them. He reflected that there was a strong sense of denying one’s Americanness and to stop being American. People became part of the woodwork.⁷ Don Gayton, a draft resister who had been in Canada since the early 1970s, concurred, observing, Expatriate Americans have a curious role in Canada. For the most part they try very hard to blend in. People of other nationalities tend to gravitate toward each other in specific Canadian cities and neighborhoods, but expat Americans do just the opposite. You will never find an ethnic enclave of Americans.⁸

U.S. émigrés in Canada often expressed an affinity for something beyond the nation. AMEX/Canada, an immigrant aid group for U.S. residents in Canada, surveyed subscribers to its publications in 1973 about their motivations for coming to Canada, their intentions to remain there, and their connections to the United States and other U.S. émigrés. To the question What do you see as your primary identity?, some readers admitted ambivalence. For example, a Whaletown, British Columbia, resident responded, I don’t know—sometimes Canadian, sometimes American.⁹ Others resisted labels that connected them to nations. A Drumheller, Alberta, man identified himself as a citizen of the world, a member of the human race, while Socialist human being of no nationality as primary identity was the response of an Ottawa resident.¹⁰ A Toronto man identified himself as primarily religious; hence no need to have any citizenship, claiming that he could not give allegiance to any country because he had renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1970. He also allowed that he had little interest in meeting with others from the United States for social or political activities because I feel no deep affinity with anyone on national or political grounds.¹¹ A London, Ontario, man admitted that when I took what was then (1965) the extreme step of going to live in another country I never imagined that what I saw as a moral necessity would be less than a crime to other Americans. I accepted the legal price for what was essentially an individual moral action.¹² Similarly, a twenty-two-year-old man exiled in Canada in the late 1960s described the evolution of his feelings about nationalism to an interviewer: During high school … I became interested in the war in Vietnam. I went to Europe when I was 18 and came back confused. I split with religion and nationalism, that is, God and country. I broke from materialism and felt detached from the U.S. I don’t even consider myself part of the U.S. Politically, I am in no man’s land. I am not accepted by anybody and I don’t want to be.¹³

In a similar vein, in 1974, Bill King, a young American man exiled in Toronto, wrote to Gerald Ford to complain about the restrictions of the Presidential Clemency Program for draft resisters. His plaint articulated his worldview by pointing to the conceit of the Ford administration that U.S. residency was superior to exile in other countries and that draft resisters and military deserters would willingly surrender much to regain the freedom to legally return to the United States. He asserted to Ford that As an American, born in Illinois and raised in the Minnesota middle class, I realize that it is difficult for most Americans to realize that non-Americans are equal human beings with as much talent, pride, morality, and dignity as those who happen to have been born in the U.S. I am a citizen of the world; all people are my brothers and sisters. Without the assumption that being American is somehow better than being human, your proposal makes no sense.¹⁴

Despite ambivalence about national allegiances and the lack of feeling kinship ties, the émigrés recognized Canada as a space in which they were free to shrug off the bonds of U.S. citizenship and to experience life more on their own terms. That often required exchanging nation for conscience. In Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s, U.S. émigrés were able to embrace more cosmopolitan ideals that helped them transcend nations and the obligations they placed on their citizens.

Canada was not bereft of internal political problems during the 1960s and 1970s. A political movement in the province of Québec matched opposition to the war in Vietnam in the United States. Adherents to this movement, who hoped to separate Québec into its own sovereign nation, escalated their protests throughout the 1960s. From 1963 to 1970, the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec, or, Québec Liberation Front) committed acts of vandalism, arson, and robbery during which members stole money and military equipment. The FLQ planted over eighty bombs throughout Québec and in the Canadian capital city of Ottawa, many of which detonated, killing at least four people and injuring dozens. During the October Crisis of 1970, cells of the FLQ kidnapped two government officials and murdered one of them, causing the government of Canada to enforce the War Measures Act, which put the country under martial law, suspending civil liberties for six months.¹⁵ Police detained nearly five hundred people, including members of the FLQ and other individuals deemed subversive, including some U.S. émigré draft resisters and military deserters. The Canadian military deployed to protect various people and places in the province of Québec and nearby Ottawa. Groups aiding U.S. émigrés to Canada advised those who could not speak French not to move to Québec.¹⁶ Such militarism in Canada was a deterrent to immigrants who hoped to go there and was a shock not only to Canadians, especially those in Montréal, but also to those from the United States who had immigrated to Canada in opposition to the militarism of their home country.¹⁷

Black draft-age men went to Canada, but the exact number of them is impossible to ascertain. Despite racism being as prevalent in the military as in U.S. society as a whole, Black men could gain some advantages in the military that they might have difficulty realizing outside of it, such as better food, shelter, and vocational training. As the journalist Myra MacPherson observed in Long Time Passing, her 1984 study of the impact of the Vietnam War on U.S. society, During Vietnam, for some, it was the Army or jail; for others it was the Army or unemployment. Boredom and the lack of a future on ghetto streets played a part. Further, the historian Amy J. Rutenberg observed that minority and working-class men came from communities that venerated the military values of ‘brotherhood, team work, bravery and ruggedness’ and that had strong traditions of military service during wartime. For this reason, those who sought to resist service often did so privately, avoiding, or being unaware of, antiwar organizations or draft counselors who could help them.¹⁸

Local draft boards, usually comprised of white, middle-aged businessmen and World War II and Korean War veterans, were more likely to conscript Black and Hispanic men than white men. This race bias was criticized by many and led to the creation of a draft lottery in 1969, which randomized who was called up for potential military service among draft-age men. While racism was less of an issue for them, economically and educationally disadvantaged whites dealt with some of the same issues as Blacks and Hispanics. All were less likely than middle- and upper-class white men to be able to afford such professionals as attorneys, physicians, and psychologists who could help them resist the draft. For these reasons, Blacks, Hispanics, other minorities, and members of other disadvantaged groups were more likely to go to Canada in the Vietnam War era as military deserters than as draft resisters.¹⁹

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Chapter 1 of this book describes a unique confluence of conditions in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the possibility of emigration, the proximity of Canada to the United States, and the Vietnam War—that propelled tens of thousands out of the country who resisted absorption into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War or who were uncomfortable with social conditions in the United States during that era. This emigration produced a set of events and ideas that transcended particular protagonists and locales, had links to émigrés from the United States from throughout its history, and had ramifications that reach into the twenty-first century. In chapter 2 I analyze print-based sources of information, especially magazine articles, travel literature, advice manuals for the military draft, and correspondence between (potential) émigrés and immigrant aid groups, that influenced young people from the United States to immigrate, especially to Canada. Such media painted generally positive portrayals of Canada and of U.S. immigrants who had gone there, thereby paving an attractive road north and out of the country for tens of thousands of others. Throughout the book I privilege these twentieth-century popular press accounts—and archival sources—to locate the voices of those who experienced this immigration. I incorporated few twenty-first-century primary sources such as interviews and correspondence.

In chapters 3 and 4 I analyze two manifestations of the affinity of those émigrés for a cosmopolitanism located in institutions that extend beyond the nation, but in which they could easily participate in their day-to-day lives, wherever they chose to live them: religion and postsecondary education. Churches and church groups in Canada provided humanitarian and pastoral aid to U.S. immigrants. Many men went to Canada not only to resist the draft but also to pursue undergraduate, graduate, or professional degrees. While émigrés tried to embrace cosmopolitan ideals, Canadian religious organizations hoped to attract the attention of the Canadian government and public with their good deeds. At the same time, many people in Canadian higher education looked to the government to staunch the flow of American men to Canadian graduate schools and to Canadian university faculties out of concern they would bring U.S. sensibilities and intellectual ideas to Canadian classrooms.

In chapter 5 I consider challenges to émigrés’ assertions of cosmopolitanism posed by various schemes of the Canadian and U.S. governments in the 1970s to protect the sovereignty of their nations by trying to claim, reclaim, and redeem U.S. émigrés. Finally, in chapter 6 I consider the ways in which U.S. émigrés asserted their sense of cosmopolitanism to bring changes to the concepts of immigration, citizenship, compulsory military service, and identity, as asserted by such documents as passports, as they evolved in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In this book I present a challenge to paradigms in the study of U.S. immigration history. No matter their disdain for the concept of nations in general, the modern geopolitical (and existential) reality is that these Americans had to live somewhere—in some country in the world. It would be easy to discount emigrants from the United States as members of another nation and therefore no longer a part of U.S. history. Those who leave the United States are often omitted from U.S. historical narratives out of anger, shame, confusion, or willful attempts to obscure the possibility that the United States is not a city upon a hill for all people.²⁰ This study rescues U.S. émigrés to Canada in the Vietnam War era from such ahistoricity. Following those émigrés out of the country and understanding the motivations for their departure and the extent to which they were able to start new lives in places outside the United States are compelling perspectives through which we can extend and enrich the history of the United States. More important, I assert that these émigrés, even as they moved from one nation to another, recognized a space that was beyond nations, with a prescience that points to a new paradigm—movement not between nations but between places—for understanding the history of immigration in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first.²¹

1 • ESCAPING OVER THE BORDER

The Americans Who Went to Canada

It’s not just the draft.

Nor is it that I particularly believe in … revolutionary ideas.

It’s that every time I’ve crossed the Detroit River to Windsor,

I’ve had this feeling as if I’d escaped from a police state,

like over the Berlin Wall.

—anonymous Detroit resident and Vietnam War draft resister (1967)

One of the largest exoduses from the United States took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when over 50,000 men and women emigrated from the United States to Canada. They left either to resist being drafted into U.S. military service during the Vietnam War era, after going AWOL (absent without leave) from the military, in support of draft resisters or military deserters, or in opposition to U.S. foreign policy or domestic social conditions. The exact number of these emigrants is difficult to determine, since neither the U.S. nor Canadian governments tallied émigrés who cited draft resistance, military desertion, or war opposition as the reason for their immigration.¹ Use of the term draft resister in this book reflects a sentiment that men who found ways not to enter military service did so with conviction. Other terms, such as draft dodger, appear in this book, but they are the words of others who used them colloquially, sometimes with the intention of using them pejoratively. Use of the terms desertion and military deserter echoes the U.S. government description of this action, as found in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.² The adjective American in this book is used to describe people from the United States, although anyone from anywhere in the Americas could claim the descriptor.

Although they were not required to serve in the U.S. military, women (often wives, girlfriends, mothers, and sisters) and other non-draft-age male family members accompanied resisting men to Canada or went there of their own volition. For example, the urban planner Jane Jacobs moved her family from New York City to Toronto in 1968, days before her oldest son turned eighteen, because she and her husband did not want their sons to serve in the military, or to go to jail for refusing to serve in the U.S. military during a war that they found immoral, senseless, and cruel.³ In other cases women moved to Canada alone, or in groups.⁴ This book, however, is primarily concerned with American men of draft age, as they alone were subject to conscription and military laws of the United States in this era.

All of these émigrés’ departures can be viewed as noncooperation with, or nonparticipation in, a U.S. society with which they felt at odds. The departures of draft-age men carried the added significance that they came in direct opposition to U.S. conscription laws and military policies. Such disobedience resulted in loss of full citizenship status in the United States, but movement to Canada opened new possibilities for a different type of citizenship, one less concerned with a young man’s potential contribution to the military might of a nation and more concerned with the man’s freedom of expression, which could include opposition to war.⁵ This exodus of people sparked discussion not only in the United States and Canada but also around the world, and it was the subject of much press coverage in newspapers, popular magazines, association and religious publications, and underground press, as well as in books from commercial publishers and grassroots organizations.

The departures of tens of thousands from the United States forever changed the families, friendships, and communities they left behind, as well as the communities they entered or created in Canada. Thousands of people on both sides of the border were involved in grassroots efforts to counsel émigrés and would-be émigrés, providing them with food, shelter, and monetary, pastoral, and moral support. The laity and clergy of many churches and religious organizations in Canada and the United States—and worldwide—felt compelled to help them. The draft drained thousands of male graduate students away from U.S. universities, but those who moved to Canada had a chance to remain in school, where they had a profound impact on the university system and intellectual climate there. Presidents, prime ministers, U.S. cabinet officials, Canadian cabinet ministers, members of the U.S. Congress, members of the Canadian Parliament, and various state, provincial, and local officials on both sides of the border commented on and debated legislation concerning this large movement of people.

The military draft in the Vietnam War era laid bare citizenship requirements reserved for American men aged eighteen to twenty-six years, particularly in contrast to those for men outside that age range and women, just as it exposed racial and class inequities among the draft-age male cohort.⁶ Draft laws in the United States were in constant flux from the end of World War II until the establishment of an all-volunteer military force in 1973, as the United States grappled with how to flex its military might in the Cold War era. The large influx of young men—and those who accompanied them—to Canada brought changes in immigration laws and citizenship requirements in both countries, contributing to the reframing of citizenship rights and responsibilities on both sides of the border. Reluctance to fulfill military obligations compelled some men not only to leave the United States but to renounce their U.S. citizenship.

Because Canada had no military draft at the time, having discontinued compulsory military service at the end of World War II, it would not extradite men who were in violation of draft laws of other countries. During the late 1960s, Canada went from passive to conscious acceptance of these immigrants. It did so in a couple of ways. In October 1967 the Immigration Branch of the Canadian government instituted a new system for evaluating potential immigrants to Canada. The new system was sympathetic to younger people, to those with more education, to those who could speak English, and to those who had the potential for holding down a job, particularly those with occupational skills in demand in Canada—all likely attributes of draft-age men from the United States.⁷

A second major change came nineteen months later. After months of parliamentary debate and pressure from many groups, the Canadian government, under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, announced on May 22, 1969, that it would treat draft resisters and military deserters as ordinary immigrants, meaning that Canada would admit them without any question as to their status with the U.S. Selective Service System (SSS) and would refuse to deport them, as long as they otherwise qualified as immigrants to Canada. The policy went into practice when Allan J. MacEachen, the minister of manpower and immigration, issued a memorandum declaring that

membership in the armed service of another country—or desertion if you like, potential or actual—will not be a factor in determining the eligibility of persons applying for landed immigrant status in Canada, whether such persons apply from within Canada, at points of entry, or at Canadian immigration offices abroad. If a serviceman from another country meets our immigration criteria, he will not be turned down because he is still in the active service of his country. Therefore, the selection criteria and requirements applying to him will be the same as those that apply to other applicants.

Our basic position is that the question of an individual’s membership or potential membership in the armed services of his own country is a matter to be settled between the individual and his government, and is not a matter in which we should become involved.⁸

This clear assertion of policy encouraged thousands of Americans to emigrate from the United States to Canada over the next four-and-a-half years. Ostensibly, this could have applied to military deserters from any army in the world, but most significantly, it served as a green light for movement north over the U.S.-Canadian border.

The large movement of people from the United States to Canada was the result of a cultural opening created by immigration, the proximity of Canada to the United States, and the Vietnam War coming together in the 1960s and 1970s. People have always immigrated, usually deciding to move in an effort to improve—even save—their lives. The importance of Canada for the story that follows began in the late eighteenth century, when the United States began to exist as a nation, after some of the colonists of European descent who had settled in North America decided to rule themselves while others decided to remain subjects of the king of England, thereby splitting northern North America into two nations. The importance of Vietnam for this story does not develop until the mid-twentieth century, when its people struggled for independence (much like many British North Americans had in the late eighteenth century) rather than be ruled by France and Japan, which had colonized them over the previous century. The strong interest that the government of the United States took in the outcome of the ensuing civil war in Vietnam, 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) from Los Angeles, would propel this southeast Asian country into the consciousness of Americans, particularly those who would be affected by U.S. military involvement there.

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People have always moved from place to place. Movement often comes as people seek economic, political, or social conditions that better suit them—and sometimes to save their lives. The traditional narrative of U.S. history emphasizes the influx of heroic people, especially those of European origin, to the United States, moving as pioneering settlers who opened frontiers and constructed new nations, bearing individual initiative and progress to the cutting edge of world history.⁹ Other people move because they are forced to—because their dislocation benefits their oppressors. In U.S. history such people have included aboriginals forced off land coveted by Europeans (who themselves had been immigrants to North America), as well as Africans brought to North America into chattel slavery. Later in this narrative come people of Asian and Eastern European origin, usually as laborers working on terms set by people descended from earlier waves of European immigration. More inclusive histories acknowledge people of European origin who moved to the United States from other places in the Americas, notably from its immediate neighbors, Mexico and Canada.

Although they tend to disappear from the traditional narrative of U.S. history, some people have left the United States. Social conditions brought them prejudice because of the color of their skin, their ethnicity, their gender, their sexuality, or their religious practices. In other cases, people from the United States determined they could practice their art, métier, religion, or personal or political beliefs more freely outside the United States. Such emigrants committed what some patriots believe to be, as the historian Roger Daniels characterized it, the most profoundly un-American act that one can imagine by leaving the United States.¹⁰

The perceived odiousness of expatriation from the United States can perhaps explain the paucity of scholarship on this sort of immigration. The U.S. government does not track expatriation, or if it does, it does not publish statistics on it. The U.S. government vade mecum Historical Statistics of the United States reports data collected by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service on immigration to the United States but does not report data on emigration from the United States after 1957, aside from expulsions and deportations of aliens.¹¹ While this source reports data on U.S. immigrants to Canada, those data were collected by the government of Canada, not by the United States.¹² As the economic historian Richard Sutch once observed, We have a lot of good data on how many people arrived, but very bad data on how many people left.¹³

There have been many notably large expatriations from the United States. Approximately sixteen thousand African Americans, liberated from slavery in the United States in the nineteenth century, were encouraged to enjoy that freedom in Liberia, which was not necessarily the place whence their ancestors came, rather than in the United States, the country in which most were born and raised.¹⁴ Religious freedom has less often been the motivation for expatriation, but it was for adherents to Mormonism who left Illinois in 1846 with hopes that they would experience less oppression in Utah, which was, at the time, a part of Mexico. After the U.S. Civil War, Confederados, former Confederates who could not abide by the terms of Reconstruction, or who wished to continue an antebellum way of life, including slave ownership, moved from the United States to such places as Cuba and Brazil, where slavery remained legal until the 1880s.¹⁵ In the twentieth century, many artists, such as the writers Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and James Baldwin, the painter Mary Cassatt, and the performer Josephine Baker, chose to live and work in France.

Quite often Canada has been