Unguarded Border: American émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War By Donald W.Maxwell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 281 pages. $32.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐1978834026

Donald W. Maxwell's Unguarded Border: American Émigrés in Canada During the Vietnam War is the book that those of us who have been studying American draft evaders in Canada have been eagerly awaiting for years. It is the first major scholarly work on this subject to assess the topic on a national level. It is a welcome addition to the small yet robust—and steadily growing—body of literature on the tens of thousands of Americans who journeyed north to Canada in the 1960s and 1970s to avoid the draft and—by extension—to avoid serving with the US armed forces in Vietnam. Unguarded Border is written in an accessible, jargon-free style that is likely to extend its reach beyond an academic audience. The book's finest quality, however, is its ambitious breadth. What few scholarly books have been written on the subject (e.g., Frank Kusch's All American Boys [2001], John Hagan's Northern Passage [2001], and Kathleen Rodgers's Welcome to Resisterville [2014]) are more limited in scope than Maxwell's book. Localized studies and collections of oral histories form much of the literature on American draft evaders in Canada. Maxwell's book, however, offers something more remarkable. He has managed to capture a complex and sweeping history extraordinarily well in six chapters organized along a mix of thematic and chronological lines. (Parts of Chapter 5 appeared in this journal in October 2015.) The author deserves praise for mapping out chapter-length frameworks that enable the reader to understand this multifaceted and multilayered story, without sacrificing any of the complexity of the history. The thematic nature of the chapters—which include profiles of the Americans who went to Canada; how US émigrés discovered moving to Canada as an option; religious involvement in the movement of American émigrés; communities of American draft evaders on university campuses; policymaking at the highest levels of government; and the changing nature of the border between Canada and the United States—all contribute to an overarching history that holds together extremely well. In this case, the thematic and the chronological dovetail perfectly. This approach enables the author to plug multiple strands of history (government policymaking, immigration, community building, dissent, etc.) into his chapters. Throughout Unguarded Border, Maxwell reveals a sophisticated understanding of the subtle differences—as well as the striking similarities—between Canadian and US societies, all of which made Canada a prime destination for thousands of American draft evaders. Other countries, such as England, Sweden, and Mexico, attracted American émigrés during the Vietnam War, but by far the largest number of them moved to Canada. The porous border between Canada and the United States—which became more intensely regulated by both governments after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001—facilitated the steady back-and-forth movement of people between the two countries for generations. “Quite often Canada has been the destination of expatriates from the United States,” Maxwell writes. “The two countries share history, language, culture, and geography, differing primarily by how and when they separated themselves from Britain and how they govern themselves now” (14). Unguarded Border contains vivid accounts of the communities of American expatriates in Canada, with a focus on larger cities such as Montreal, Vancouver, and especially Toronto. Maxwell furnishes plenty of individual stories of émigrés without ever losing sight of the larger story. The reader comes away from this book with a clear sense of the draft resistance culture that Americans created in Canada. “While their movement was undoubtedly motivated by the disadvantages and advantages posed by residency in the two nations,” Maxwell observes, “émigrés carved out a space in which they could live their lives the way they wanted” (176). The evaders who reached Canadian soil in the 1960s and early 1970s arrived at a time of transition, when distinct new forms of nationalism were emerging in the country. Some Canadians welcomed the new arrivals, helping them find jobs and offering other types of assistance. Yet others were more distrustful of the Americans, especially those whose newfound nationalism was built partly on distrust of Canada's neighbors to the south. Tensions were sometimes palpable between the émigrés and their newfound compatriots. Another of Maxwell's strengths is his ability to seamlessly weave broader context into the story of the American draft evaders who emigrated to Canada. This is not simply the story of the thousands of young men and women who relocated to Canada from the United States to avoid serving in Vietnam. It is also a study of the Vietnam War and the anti-Vietnam War movement, which drew the activist energies of large numbers of American émigrés in Canada, but by no means all of them. Community formation emerges as another important theme in the book, with American arrivals in Canada tending to group together in neighborhoods such as Toronto's Baldwin Village. Within these enclaves, tightly knit groups of men and women formed close bonds with one another over their shared identity and commitment to helping other Americans escape the draft. In addition, Maxwell explores policymaking in Canada, especially high-level decisions in the federal-level Department of Manpower and Immigration (later known by the less gendered name of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada) to liberalize citizenship laws for American draft evaders and support policies refusing to extradite them back to the United States. By the early 1970s, with unemployment levels on the rise in Canada, the country's liberal immigration policies with regard to Americans avoiding the Vietnam War became increasingly unpopular with a larger segment of the population. By 1972, the federal government based in Ottawa began to tighten restrictions for immigrants, including arrivals from the United States. Partly, this occurred in response to the increasingly icy relations between Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and President Richard Nixon, which partly had to do with tensions surrounding American draft evaders—or “draft dodgers,” as Nixon preferred to call them (127). With the passage of time, communities of American émigrés in Canada began to split between those who were gradually beginning to identify more closely with their adopted country and its culture, versus the men and women whose sights remained firmly fixed on Canada's neighbor to the south with the goal of eventually returning to the United States. In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty in the form of a pardon to draft evaders, thousands of them returned to the United States. But a significant number remained in their adopted country. “Approximately half the men who went from the United States to Canada were still there in the mid-1990s,” Maxwell writes (158). Ultimately, Unguarded Border—because of its broad sweep—leaves plenty of room for future researchers to continue exploring this intriguing topic, especially those utilizing more localized approaches. Maxwell's emphasis is on larger cities, and even within those, there are details and nuances that he simply does not have the room to explore in this study. Moreover, there were countless communities outside of his range of exploration, such as Waterloo Region in Ontario (consisting mainly of the cities of Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge), that drew critical masses of émigrés, and that beg for further exploration. This is not a critique of the book. No single work can be a history of everything. The best books, like Unguarded Border, help to establish a foundation for future research. For now, Donald Maxwell's Unguarded Border is the definitive book on US émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War. For a book that is under 300 pages (and under 200 pages when you subtract the footnotes), Unguarded Border feels much larger than its page numbers would indicate. Maxwell builds his account on a rich array of sources, including oral histories, Canadian and US government documents, the papers of anti-draft organizations across Canada, the correspondence of American draft evaders, and archives of religious organizations actively involved in helping the émigrés, including the Quakers and Mennonites. It is a sprawling book, rich in detail, blending compelling storytelling with sharp analysis, and it belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in immigration history, peace movements and dissent, the Vietnam War, and the upheavals and transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. Andrew Hunt is a professor of US history at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. He is the author of The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1999), David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary (2006), We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan (2021), and Beatlemania in America: Fan Culture From Below (2023).

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