Puerto Rico and the Philippines are two of the areas that have sent the greatest proportion of their populations to the United States. The parallels in their histories can help to explain why.
Puerto Rico, with almost 3 million migrants, and the Philippines, with almost 1.5 million migrants, represent, after Mexico and China (both much larger countries), the largest migrant groups in the United States. (Mexico had over 9 million, according to the 2000 census, and China 1.5 million.) The 2000 census surveys recorded a total population of 76 million in the Philippines and 3.8 million in Puerto Rico.
Like Puerto Rico, the Philippines was a Spanish colony coveted by the United States until 1898. “Cuba has a remarkable counterpart in the Far East,” explained the U.S. minister to Siam in 1897. The natives are “gentle, polite, and hospitable,” yet not at all “ambitious”: “thirty-five dollars will provide a man with abundant food and clothing for a year.” Furthermore, “although inclined to be lazy, as are all tropical people, they are exceedingly fond of amusements.”17
The people may have been poor, but the land was rich. “In material wealth the Philippines are lavishly blessed. Hemp, sugar, and tobacco are three products that bring enormous profits, and coffee bids fair to soon rival them.” Foreign trade was valued at $35 million the previous year.18 “The prodigality of nature impresses the traveler wherever he journeys.”19
Almost everybody in the United States has heard of the “Spanish-American War.” This war was fought, of course, in Cuba, and Cubans tend to see it as just one more example of imperial arrogance that their role in the war is ignored in the United States. Actually, the Cubans had been fighting for several decades for independence from Spain before the United States intervened in 1898.
The Treaty of Paris that ended the war ceded not only Cuba but also other formerly Spanish island territories to the United States: Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The first three acquiesced relatively peacefully to the transfer of power from Spain to the United States, but the Philippine independence movement rose up in arms. The U.S.–Philippine war hasn’t entered the history books—it doesn’t even have an official name. But it was the first guerrilla war, and the first Asian war, that the United States fought. More people died in that conflict than in the Spanish-American War, and it lasted much longer.
In the context of the U.S. war against the Philippines, Rudyard Kipling published his well-known poem “The White Man’s Burden,” defending the colonial enterprise, in McClure’s Magazine in February 1899. The “burden” was the racial obligation to conquer—for the benefit of the Filipinos, of course: “Send forth the best ye breed,” Kipling wrote, “Go bind your sons to exile, / To serve your captives’ need.” Those conquered were notoriously ungrateful for the sacrifice the whites made on their behalf: the “new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half-child” usually gave the white man only his “old reward”: “the blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard.” Still, his inherent superiority gave the white man the duty to govern others, even against their will.20
One outspoken southern challenger of the U.S. racial order at the time, Reverend Quincy Ewing of Mississippi, noted the connection between domestic racism and foreign expansion inherent in the poem:
Northern applause of the policy of shooting down weaker brown men in distant islands to civilize them, or even to “save their souls”—must inevitably plant seeds of bitter fruit for black men in the southern states of this country, and perhaps, nay, very probably, in all the others. I cannot believe I am mistaken in supposing that the lynching spirit has shown itself conspicuously bold and self-congratulatory in the northern and western as well as in the southern states of the union, since it became possible for the hoarse and brutal muse of Rudyard Kipling to sing the nation’s policy and purpose. If millions of brown men across the thousands of miles of sea are the white nation’s burden—to be dealt with as a burden—why may not the white men of the southern states look upon the black man, separated from them by no sea at all, as their burden, to be dealt with as a burden rather than as men?21
Political cartoons consistently used racist images based on blacks in the U.S. south to depict the inhabitants of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. American soldiers “commonly referred to Filipinos as ‘niggers.’ ”22
As Senator Alfred Beveridge proclaimed in 1898, “Why is it more difficult to administer Hawaii than New Mexico or California? Both had a savage and an alien population: both were more remote from the seat of government when they came under our dominion than the Philippines are today.” Colonial subjects were to be ruled. To opponents who questioned the legitimacy of Anglo-Saxon rule over others, he replied, “We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent.”23
Others used the association of old and new colonial subjects to argue against annexation. Southern segregationists like Benjamin Tillman could also be anti-imperialists. Tillman referred to Kipling’s poem when he explained to the U.S. Senate in 1899 why southern Democrats had voted overwhelmingly against the treaty:
It was not because we are Democrats, but because we understand and realize what it is to have two races side by side that can not mix or mingle without deterioration and injury to both and the ultimate destruction of the civilization of the higher. We of the South have borne this white man’s burden of a colored race in our midst since their emancipation and before.
It was a burden upon our manhood and our ideas of liberty before they were emancipated. It is still a burden, although they have been granted the franchise … We are not responsible, because we inherited it, and your fathers as well as ours are responsible for the presence amongst us of that people. Why do we as a people want to incorporate into our citizenship ten millions more of different or of differing races, three or four of them?24
Still, as journalist and diplomat John Barrett pointed out in the North American Review, the Philippines were “one of the greatest undeveloped opportunities in all the world—a group of islands with numberless riches and resources awaiting exploitation, and capable of providing a market for a large quantity of our manufactured products.”25
Until 1898, all of the territories that the United States incorporated fell under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—they were incorporated with the understanding that they would ultimately be admitted into statehood. The size of the nonwhite populations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines worried even the most ardent imperialists. In 1901, the Supreme Court resolved the issue by creating the category of “unincorporated territory” that allowed the United States to own and control the territories without having to extend the Constitution to them. “Whilst in an international sense Porto Rico was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” explained the court.26
“We come not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends,” President McKinley explained in announcing U.S. sovereignty in the Philippines. He declared that all who cooperated “will receive the reward of [U.S.] support and protection. All others will be brought within the lawful rule we have assumed, with firmness if need be.”27
Likewise in a proclamation to the people of Puerto Rico upon occupying their country in July 1898, U.S. general Nelson Miles insisted upon the benevolence of his enterprise:
In the cause of liberty, justice, and humanity, [U.S.] military forces have come to occupy the island of Puerto Rico. They come bearing the banner of freedom, inspired by a noble purpose to seek the enemies of our country and yours, and to destroy or capture all who are in armed resistance … The chief object of the American military forces will be to overthrow the armed authority of Spain, and to give the people of your beautiful island the largest measure of liberty consistent with this occupation … It is not our purpose to interfere with any existing laws and customs … so long as they conform to the rules of military administration of order and justice. This is not a war of devastation, but one to give all within the control of [U.S.] military and naval forces the advantages and blessings of enlightened civilization.28
For the people of these territories, too, a new category had to be invented: the “U.S. national,” neither citizen nor alien. They had no political rights, but they did have the right to travel to the mainland.29 Some protested that Filipinos, because they were racially ineligible for citizenship, should be excluded under the same laws that prohibited other Asians from entering the United States. Congress, however, insisted that the United States could not prohibit entry as long as it held the Philippines as a territory.
Sugar plantations in Hawaii recruited and imported both Puerto Rican and Filipino workers, taking advantage of their status as “nationals.” U.S. sugar planters in Hawaii had imported over 200,000 workers from Japan, China, Portugal, and Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth century, before the islands were subject to U.S. immigration laws. When Hawaii was annexed in 1898, however, planters turned to the Philippines. From 1909 to 1929, some 120,000 Filipinos were brought to Hawaii to work on the plantations.30 Many of those followed labor recruiters on to the mainland, to the fields of California. The 1930 census found 45,000 Filipinos on the mainland and 63,000 in Hawaii.31
Lawyer Madison Grant, one of the founders of the U.S. eugenicist and “scientific” racist movement in the early twentieth century (and cited as an inspiration for Nazi eugenics policy), wrote, “The swarming of the Filipinos into the Pacific states brings with it a repetition of the Chinese problem of sixty years ago. California is determined that the white man there shall not be replaced by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexican, or the Filipino.”32 In the view of the scientific racists, the white man’s destiny was to “replace” people of color, but never to be “replaced” by them. Perhaps at the heart of these manifestations of racial exclusionism in the United States is the original sin—the fact that the country was founded, and expanded, by replacing its original inhabitants. In order to justify this original replacement, the right of whites to expand, and the fate of people of color to disappear, had to be constantly reiterated and reenacted.
In 1934 the Philippines Independence Act turned the country into a commonwealth—another invented status—and putting it on a ten-year path to independence.33 Echoing Samuel Gompers’s argument against annexation of the Philippines three decades earlier, Madison Grant wrote that “as a safeguard to our own racial welfare, it might become necessary to give the Filipino his independence.”34
With the stroke of a pen, Filipinos became “aliens” and lost their right to enter the United States. U.S. citizens retained their right to enter the Philippines and be treated as full citizens there.35 The 60,000 Filipinos who had settled in the United States, mostly as agricultural workers in California, were offered various incentives for repatriation. Few were interested in the offer, especially since it meant giving up their right to return to the United States.
California’s nineteenth-century anti-miscegenation laws prohibited marriages between whites and “negroes, mulattoes, and Mongolians.”36 Such legislation was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883, and by the 1920s thirty-eight states had anti-miscegenation laws on the books. Sixteen states still prohibited interracial marriage when the court overturned that ruling in 1967. (Alabama did not revoke its statute until 2000, and even then, 40 percent of the voters wanted to keep it.)37
The courts could not agree, however, on whether Filipinos were “Mongolians” or “Malays,” and in 1933 the Los Angeles Superior Court allowed a Filipino man to marry a white woman—at the same time urging the state legislature to amend the law so that Filipinos would be included. The legislature did so later that year, including “members of the Malay race” among those prohibited from marrying Caucasians.38
“The dominant race of the country has a perfect right to exclude all other races from equal rights with its own people,” explained the presiding judge in one case in the late 1920s that ruled against the right of a Filipino to marry a Caucasian.39 “I am quite satisfied in my own mind,” wrote another judge in another 1930s California case, “that the Filipino is a Malay and that a Malay is a Mongolian, just as much as the white American is of the Teutonic race, the Teutonic family, or of the Nordic family, carrying it back to the Aryan family. Hence, it is my view that under the Code of California as it now exists, intermarriage between a Filipino and a Caucasian would be void.”40
Even as the doors of exclusion were closing on Filipinos, the seeds for a later migration were being sown through the U.S. colonial system in the Philippines. Establishing a public health and sanitation infrastructure was a component of U.S. imperial policy in both the Caribbean and the Pacific. It supported the ideology of Anglo-Saxon uplift of backward peoples and conveniently made the tropics safe for white settlers at the same time.41 During the 1920s the U.S. government and the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Board created a nursing education program in the Philippines based on the U.S. model. The language of instruction was English.
When Filipino independence was finally completed in 1946 (delayed by the Second World War), it was qualified by the Bell Act, which stipulated an unequal “free trade”—U.S. goods could enter the Philippines in unlimited quantities, duty free, while Filipino goods were subject to quotas. U.S. citizens and corporations were also granted investment privileges in the country. Finally, the U.S. controlled the exchange rate. In addition, the U.S. maintained full sovereignty over its twenty-three military installations in the Philippines.42
Filipinos had, of course, been working for U.S. employers for years: on sugar plantations, as soldiers in the U.S. army, and on U.S. bases in the Philippines, which directly employed almost 70,000 Filipinos in the 1980s.43 Independence only reinforced the unequal economic and cultural relationships that contributed to migration.
A generation of Filipina nurses was poised to take advantage of the opportunity created in 1948 when the U.S. began an exchange visitor program to bring Filipina nurses to the U.S. for postgraduate study in U.S. hospitals.44 Airlines and travel agencies enthusiastically promoted the program in the Philippines.45
The ostensible idea of the program was that the nurses would return home to bring their education back to their people. But in the United States, a nursing shortage approaching crisis proportions led hospitals to recruit the students and provide them with green cards to stay and work here. Between 1948 and 1973, 12,000 Filipina nurses came to the States to study, and many of them stayed and became citizens.46 The 1965 Immigration Act added incentives by making nurses a category of workers eligible for preferential visas, and U.S. hospitals and Filipino travel agencies stepped up their recruitment efforts.47 (Another 17,000 Filipinos were brought to the U.S. for military training between 1950 and the early 1980s.48 By 1970, 14,000 Filipinos were serving in the U.S. navy, more than the total number serving in the Philippines’ own navy.49) By 1989, 73 percent of foreign nurses in the United States were from the Philippines. They worked primarily in large public hospitals in major U.S. cities. In New York City, 18 percent of RNs were Filipino.50
By 2005, U.S. hospitals were reporting an ever-growing nursing deficit that had reached 118,000.51 The “nursing shortage” in the United States was rooted in two interrelated phenomena. First, low wages and poor working conditions are characteristic of nursing jobs, as they are of agricultural and domestic work. Not surprisingly, people with other options tend to avoid the most onerous ones. Employers then find that they can’t fill their positions, and the government helps them to import workers who have fewer options.
Second, the health-care sector underwent its own restructuring in the post-1965 period. U.S. workers began to obtain health plans through their employers even prior to 1965. Government programs like Medicare and Medicaid increased access to health care in the 1960s. The shift from private doctors to HMOs and hospitals in the 1980s and ’90s further increased the demand for nurses. Government cutbacks and employer pressure, meanwhile, forced health-care providers to continually cut costs. So the demand for nurses rose, but working conditions in the sector stayed poor.52
As with agriculture, the U.S. government has greatly facilitated a continuing influx of foreign nurses. Some qualify for immigrant visas because the Department of Labor has kept nurses listed as a profession in need of immigrant workers; others come on temporary work visas. Repeated revisions of the law have allowed more nurses to come, and made it easier for them to stay.53 The American Hospital Association began recruiting heavily abroad, especially in the Philippines, but also in China and India. In 2005, Congress authorized an additional 50,000 visas for nurses because the 12,000 to 14,000 already authorized were nowhere near enough to fill the demand.54
Even with the poor conditions in the nursing field, as the labor market in the U.S. got worse overall, more citizens began to turn to nursing as a potential career. Nursing school applications skyrocketed. By 2005, U.S. nursing schools were rejecting 150,000 qualified applicants a year because they didn’t have enough spaces. And they couldn’t expand, because teaching nursing paid even less than being a nurse. With the shortages, schools couldn’t attract teachers.55
The United States wasn’t the only wealthy country facing the “care deficit” described by Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich (see Myth 2, on immigrants and low-paying jobs). The preparation of nurses for service abroad became a major industry in the Philippines. By 2000, over 150,000 Filipina nurses were employed in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Middle East.56
As the U.S. Congress debated new immigration legislation in 2006, the American Hospital Association lobbied hard for unlimited entry of foreign nurses. The Senate bill included this provision, though the House bill did not.57
For the Philippines and other poor countries, the hemorrhage of nurses to the wealthy world had contradictory effects. Starting salary for a nurse in the Philippines is about $2,000 a year, while in the United States it’s around $36,000.58 Filipinos working abroad sent back $10.7 billion in remittances in 2005, 13.5 percent of the country’s GDP.59
On the other hand, as the New York Times explained, “Health care has deteriorated there in recent years as tens of thousands of nurses have moved abroad. Thousands of ill-paid doctors have even abandoned their profession to become migrant-ready nurses themselves, Filipino researchers say. ‘The Filipino people will suffer because the U.S. will get all our trained nurses,’ said George Cordero, president of the Philippine Nurse Association. ‘But what can we do?’ ” A former director of the Philippine National Institutes of Health estimated that 80 percent of the country’s doctors had moved, or were in the process of moving, into nursing. “I plead for justice,” he told the Times. “There has to be give and take, not just take, take, take by the United States.”60
The specific events described here help to explain why the Philippines, like Puerto Rico, sends such an extraordinarily high proportion of its population to the United States. They also reveal a larger pattern. Colonialism sets up a system in which colonized peoples work for those who colonized them. This system is not erased after direct colonialism ends. Rather, it evolves and develops. The colonizer continues to use former colonial subjects as cheap workers, and the unequal economic relationship is also reinforced in this way. Immigration is just one piece of this larger puzzle, interlocking with all of the other pieces.