MPI Report: In 1970, there were more Pinoys serving the US Navy than the PHL Navy
By Abner Galino
A young couple enjoy teaching their daughter the proper way of moving back and forth on a swing at the Children’s Garden in Quezon Memorial Circle, Quezon City on Friday (Aug. 14, 2015). (MNS photo)
The facts bear out to the strength of Pinoy immigrant community in the US, both in terms of numbers and quality. Now, let us go back in time to see how it came to be.
Those who didn’t sleep off their history classes for most part of their high school should know that the American occupation of the Philippines started after the Spanish-American War in 1898. Through the Treaty of Paris, the Spanish empire ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, parts of the Spanish West Indies, Guam and the Philippines to the US.
Subsequently, the US Congress passed the Philippine Organic Act which organized the Insular Government and provided its basic laws. In 1935, this government was succeeded by the Commonwealth of the Philippines through the Tydings-Mcduffie Act, which prescribed a 10-year transition period for the eventual independence of the country.
The outbreak of World War II delayed the process of independence up to July 4, 1946.
As colonial subjects, Filipinos had the status of US nationals and had little restrictions in migrating to the US.
The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) traced the beginning of the modern migration of Filipinos to the US with the entry of 100 Filipino students in 1903.
“Between 1910 and 1938, more than 14,000 entered as students. In the same period, thousands of Filipinos were recruited to work in Hawaii as laborers in sugar plantations, most on temporary basis,” the MPI reported.
Filipinos came to the US during this period as students, workers and members of the US armed forces.
When US Congress passed Asian exclusion laws in 1920s, they did not apply to the Filipinos who were US nationals which allowed them to fill the agricultural labor shortages in the West Coast.
Most of those agricultural workers, the MPI said, were young men who migrated alone.
I may have been absent when the teacher discussed this, but I really didn’t know that the US Navy had begun recruiting Filipino seamen since 1903 and that by 1930s Filipinos were five percent of the US Navy manpower.
During the Cold War, the US is the second largest employer of Filipinos, aside from our own government, with 68,000 individuals in its payroll. By 1970, the MPI noted, the number of Pinoys in the US Navy was even bigger than the population of the Philippine Navy. Apparently, this was connected to the finding that from 1946 and 1965, half of all Pinoy immigrants were wives of US servicemen.
This was marked as the second wave Filipino migration to the US. Family ties, the MPI noted, assured that migration to the US would remain at a steady pace even after the US military bases were turned over to the Philippine government in 1994. This was a consequence of the abrogation of the Military Bases Agreement.
The third wave of Filipino immigration, after the passage of Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 which removed the national-origin quota system, saw the influx of Pinay (women) immigrants who filled up big demands in the health-care sector.
By 2011, about 18 percent of Pinay immigrants worked as nurses or were working in child and elder care.
There were 105,000 Pinoy immigrants in the US in 1960, according to the MPI, and now it stands at 2.9 million. The 2010 Census, however, said that there are 3.4 million Filipinos in the U.S.
The MPI study said the Philippines is the third largest remittance-receiving country in the world, after China and India. Our country received $24.5 billion worth of remittances in 2012 and $10.6 billion of this came from the Filipino diaspora in the US. The country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2012 was $250 billion.
But here is the catch: the engagement of the Filipino diaspora remains focused on family and charitable contributions.
“Two decades of corrupt, authoritarian rule under Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986), followed by 24 years of governments plagued by economic stagnation, corruption, repression, political violence and military conflict left many in the diaspora disillusioned with and alienated from the government of the Philippines,” explained the MPI report.
But the diaspora relations, it said, improved considerably since the election of Benigno Aquino III in 2010, whose term ends next year after a one-term 6-year presidency only as set in the 1986 Constitution, a provision that was supposed to prevent another dictatorship or those who want to cling to power. Be that as it may, it should be noted that it didn’t prevent Gloria Arroyo to reign for nine years, three years of which when she took over as president after an “EDSA 2” ousted the duly elected President Joseph Estrada due to gambling-related corruption charges only to run again and win for a full-year six term despite the “Hello Garci?” controversy. But that is another story altogether.