This study considers the confluence of several conditions that existed in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Vietnam War, U.S. involvement in it, public opposition to the war, emigration from the United States, and Canada’s proximity to the United States. Young American men implicated in the military draft, sympathetic family members, and others discontent with social and political conditions in the United States, often could find opportunities and incentives to leave. Travel literature about Canada and draft advice manuals painted generally positive portrayals of Canada and of immigration there.

The study places Americans in the more cosmopolitan world of religion and higher education. Canadian religious organizations had genuine interest in providing assistance to American émigrés, but also had political motivations for their charity, hoping to attract the attention of the Canadian public and government with their good deeds. Many men went to Canada, not only to avoid the draft, but also to pursue graduate or professional degrees. Their immigration coincided with a surge in nationalistic pride in Canada, brought on by celebration of the centennial of Canadian nationhood, and a movement by some in Canadian higher education to discourage admission of Americans to Canadian universities out of concern they would bring American sensibilities to Canadian classrooms.

Finally this study considers the meaning of citizenship to Vietnam War–era American émigrés to Canada. That meaning changed frequently in the 1970s, owing to the lack of tolerance for them by the Richard Nixon administration, and Gerald Ford’s conditional clemency and Jimmy Carter’s near-unconditional amnesty for their violations of draft and military laws, and reform of Canadian immigration laws. This study places the Vietnam War–era immigration of Americans to Canada into the context of global migration. The more cosmopolitan worldview of young Americans who moved to Canada in the Vietnam War era, located in their connections to grass-roots movements, religious communities, and higher education, combined a profound sense of unboundedness with a willful ignorance of constraints, and demonstrated an original sense of the spaces through and to which they could move.