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 South China Sea from mainland Southeast Asia. The Philippines has close ties to the United States because it was a US 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 US demand for cheap agricultural labor. Sugar plantations dominated the economy of Hawaii early in the twentieth 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 needed seasonal agricultural workers, was home to more than 31,000 of the 46,000 Filipinos living on the mainland in 1940. Filipino Americans continued to make up part of the migrant farm labor force of California and other western states well into the late twentieth century.

The second migration period began in 1946, when the Philippines became politically independent of the United States. Large US military bases were established in the Philippines, and many 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 US 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 19,000 mail-order brides left 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 established 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 US hospitals, and teachers from the Philippines are employed in many US schools.

Filipinos in American Society

In 1990, more than 1.4 million people in the United States identified themselves as Filipino Americans. By the time of the 2010 census, the population of Filipino Americans had reached 3.4 million. By 2023, this number had grown to 4.6 million, accounting for 19 percent of the Asian population in the US. Around 1.6 million of these Filipino Americans lived in California (or 38 percent), and over 310,000 lived in Hawaii. Other states with large numbers of Filipinos included Nevada (180,000), Texas (220,000), and Florida (180,000).

Numbers of foreign-born Filipinos increased during the 1990s. From 1990 to March 1997, according to the US Census Bureau estimates, the number of foreign-born Filipino Americans grew from 913,723 to 1,132,000. In the 2020s, about half of Filipino Americans were born in the US, with 2.24 million born in the US and 2 million born abroad.

Women outnumber men among foreign-born Filipinos, largely because marriage to US 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 Filipinos 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 US 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. By the 2020s, 79 percent of the Filipino immigrant population had lived in the US for more than ten years, and 75 percent were naturalized citizens.

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