Review: <i>Unguarded Border: American Émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War</i>, by Donald W. Maxwell
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unguarded Border skillfully tells the complex, little-known story of the thousands of U.S. citizens who emigrated to Canada to escape military service during the Vietnam War.Drawing on an impressive array of personal reminiscences, government documents, papers of antiwar organizations, and other materials, Maxwell focuses above all on the motives that drove draft-evaders and deserters to seek refuge across the border.Fear of prosecution for failing to submit to the draft unsurprisingly played a role; but so too, argues Maxwell, did the proximity of another society that was culturally familiar, easy to get into, rife with educational and job opportunities, full of sympathizers eager to support the newcomers, and almost certain to allow U.S. e migre s to stay.Canada was, in short, a uniquely attractive escape hatch, even if most draft-evaders never fully embraced a Canadian identity.Readers interested in U.S.-Canadian relations may be especially interested in Maxwell's explanation of the Ottawa government's willingness to accommodate men who had brazenly broken the law in the United States, Canada's most important ally.One reason, argues Maxwell, was Canadian hostility to the U.S. war in Vietnam.Welcoming draft-resisters was a "uniquely Canadian" way to demonstrate that opposition by capitalizing on the porous
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".