Filipino Americans

The Home Country

During his tenure, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos launched a foreign policy dubbed as “development diplomacy.” What he had in mind was to position the Philippines in the international division of labor as an exporter of human capital, a euphemism to exporting excess Filipino labor.

As early as the mid-1970s, the Philippine government began the mass deployment of skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled overseas contract workers. Currently, the recruitment of Filipino doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and caregivers is especially strong in North American and European countries, whose populations are aging rapidly. What makes this foreign policy more significant is the steady reliance on the same approach to development by those who succeeded Marcos. Today, there is no end in sight to the exodus of Filipinos abroad.

In the Philippines, overseas contract workers are lionized as the new national heroes and heroines. Such adulation is not unwarranted given that more than 8 million Filipinos, or 10% of the total population, work abroad in both land-based and sea-based occupations, remitting foreign currencies equivalent to nearly 10% of the gross national product. In 2005, Filipinos abroad sent $10.7 billion home, although actual remittances could be substantially higher given that approximately 30%, or $3 billion, of remittances are sent via nonbank channels.

Indeed, Filipinos are a diasporic people. They can be found in various regions of the world, including Western Europe, Oceania, the Middle East, North [Page 494]Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Trust Territories. However, a significant number of Filipino migrants are found in cities of the United States and Canada.

Filipinos now constitute the fastest-growing Asian group, as well as the largest Asian group, in the United States. They recently surpassed Chinese and Japanese Americans, and their numbers are substantially greater than the combined refugee population of Indochinese origin. Despite the problems encountered overseas, such as mental and physical abuse, marital and family problems, difficulty in adjusting to a new environment, professional accreditation, and racial discrimination, Filipinos are likely to continue their diaspora.

Early Filipino Immigration

The history of Filipinos in the United States is bound to the Spanish and U.S. occupations of the Philippines. As early as 1587, many Filipinos who worked with the Spanish galleons that plied the Manila-Acapulco trade route jumped ship on reaching Acapulco or California rather than return to the Philippines. In 1763, descendants of the Spanish-speaking Filipinos who deserted ship, or “Manilamen” as they were commonly called then, were still living along the bayous and marshes of Louisiana.

However, with the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, Americans debated the morality of the conquest and possession of the Philippines. In the end, the American ideals of independence and self-determination succumbed to the imperial force of providential and historical circumstances embedded in the ideology of manifest destiny. This ideology saw the English and their descendants as destined to expand their control in the Pacific Ocean and beyond and to make their civilization and language predominant.

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