Filipino Americans and race relations

SIGNIFICANCE: Filipino Americans are the third-largest Asian American group in the United States after Chinese Americans and Indian Americans, and substantial numbers of Filipino immigrants also live in a few parts of Canada such as Toronto. Although several large Filipino American communities exist, notably in California and Hawaii, members of this group can be found throughout the North American continent, often thoroughly integrated into American neighborhoods and workplaces.

The term “Filipino” refers to someone who comes from the Philippines, or whose ancestors are from the Philippines, a nation consisting of a cluster of islands located across the China Sea from mainland Southeast Asia. The Philippines has close ties to the United States because it was a U.S. possession or territory from 1898 to 1946. The United States established English as the language of instruction in high schools and colleges in the Philippines, and Filipinos have long been familiar with American movies and other media. Filipinos began settling in North America soon after the Philippines became part of the United States, and the number of Filipino Americans began to increase greatly in the late 1960s.

History of Filipino American Settlement

Filipino settlement in North America falls into three major periods. The first period, from 1906 to the beginning of World War II in 1941, resulted from the U.S. demand for cheap agricultural labor. Sugar plantations dominated the economy of Hawaii early in the 20th century, and plantation owners were interested in finding hardworking field hands who would work for low wages. The Hawaii Sugar Planters Association began recruiting in the Philippines, and by 1946, the association had brought more than a quarter of a million Filipinos to Hawaii. California, which also had a need for seasonal agricultural workers, was the home of more than thirty-one thousand of the forty-six thousand Filipinos living on the mainland in 1940. Filipino Americans continue to make up part of the migrant farm labor force of California and other western states, but the number of migrant Filipino workers is steadily decreasing.

The second migration period began in 1946, when the Philippines became politically independent of the United States. Large U.S. military bases had been established in the Philippines, and many of the Filipinos admitted to the United States were women married to American servicemen. At the same time, Filipinos who had become naturalized American citizens after the war were able to petition to have family members enter the United States. Because of these two factors, most immigrants in this period came as a result of marriage or family connections.

The United States maintained military bases in the Philippines until 1991, so Filipinos who married U.S. military personnel continued to arrive in the United States. Another form of migration through marriage is the phenomenon of mail-order brides, women who meet and marry American men through correspondence. In the 1990s, approximately nineteen thousand mail-order brides were leaving the Philippines each year to join husbands and fiancés abroad, with the United States as the primary destination. In 1997, social scientist Concepcion Montoya identified Filipina mail-order brides, who often establish social networks among themselves, as a rapidly emerging American community.

The third migration period began in 1965, when the United States passed a new immigration law that ended the discrimination against Asians present in all previous immigration laws. The result was a rapid growth in the Asian American population in general and in the Filipino American population in particular. The number of Filipinos living in the United States grew by roughly 100 percent in each ten-year period from 1960 to 1990: from 176,000 in the census of 1960 to 343,000 in that of 1970, to 775,000 in 1980, to more than 1,400,000 in the 1990 census.

The third period of Filipino immigration differs greatly from the earlier periods. Although immigrants before 1965 were mostly laborers from the rural Philippines, immigrants after 1965 tended to be highly educated professionals (such as doctors, nurses, teachers, and engineers), and they often came from cities. Migration to the United States became a goal for many Filipino professionals because economic opportunities were much greater in the United States. During the 1970s, one out of every five graduates of nursing schools in the Philippines left for the United States, and the majority of those nurses did not return to the Philippines. This may have created “brain drain” problems for the Philippines, because it lost many of its medical professionals, executives, and technicians to the United States, but this migration has been a benefit to the American economy. Filipino doctors and nurses are on the staff of many U.S. hospitals, and teachers from the Philippines are employed in many U.S. schools.

Filipinos in American Society

By 1990, more than 1.4 million people in the United States identified themselves as Filipino Americans. By 2020 this number had grown to 3 million. Almost 2 million of these Filipino Americans lived in California, and over 380,000 members of this group lived in Hawaii. Other states wth large numbers of Filipinos include Nevada, Texas, and Washington.

Most Filipino Americans are native born. In 2020, of all Filipinos in the United States, 48 percent were foreign-born while 52 percent were born in the United States. Numbers of foreign-born Filipinos increased during the 1990s. From 1990 to March 1997, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the number of foreign-born Filipino Americans grew from 913,723 to 1,132,000. By the time of the 2010 census, the population of Filipino Americans had reached 3.4 million. By 2020, the number of U.S. born Filipino's had overtaken the number of foreign born.

Year of EntryNumberPercent of all Filipino AmericansPercent who are U.S. Citizens 505,988 35.6100.0Arrived before 1980 465,358 32.8 80.6Arrived 1980–1990 448,365 31.6 26.0Total1,419,711100.0 71.3

Women outnumber men among foreign-born Filipinos, largely because marriage to U.S. citizens has continued to be a major source of migration from the Philippines. In 1990, women made up 57 percent of all foreign-born Filipino Americans and almost 60 percent of foreign-born Filipino Americans who had arrived during the 1980s.

The fact that professionals, especially medical professionals, have been such a large part of the third wave of immigrants has meant that many Filipino Americans hold middle-class jobs. A majority of employed Filipinos in the United States (55 percent) held white-collar jobs in 1990. In 2020, 46 percent of Filipinos held white-collar jobs. The average income for Filipino's in the United States was $100,600 in 2022. Almost one out of every four employed Filipino Americans over the age of sixteen worked in health services. By contrast, fewer than one out of every ten employed Americans of all backgrounds worked in hospitals or in health-related jobs in that year.

Many Filipino Americans, especially the early agricultural laborers in California, experienced discrimination. However, contemporary Filipinos usually report relatively few problems in their relations with members of other racial and ethnic groups. Familiarity with the English language and with mainstream American culture, high levels of marriage with White and Black Americans, and a concentration in skilled occupations and white-collar professions tend to help Filipino Americans in interethnic relations.

One reflection of the high degree of integration of Filipino Americans into American society is the high percentage of foreign-born Filipino Americans who take on U.S. citizenship. More than one-fourth of the Filipinos who arrived in the United States during the 1980s had been naturalized as citizens by 1990. More than 80 percent of those who had arrived before 1980 had become citizens. By contrast, fewer than 15 percent of all people who had immigrated to the United States in the 1980s had become citizens, and only 61 percent of foreign-born people who had immigrated before 1980 had become citizens.

Bibliography

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