On Trump’s Immigration Policy and the Filipino Migrants in the USA

May 13, 2025

Written by Nicole ULANDAY

“The Filipino ladies, they only do two jobs, you know? Either a beauty queen or a nurse from Mount Sinai. There’s nothing in the middle.” Standup comedian Jiaoying Summers talks about Filipinos in her comedic monologue during her tour.

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) (2023) reports that as of 2021, nearly two million Filipinos reside in the United States, representing 4% of all 45.3 million U.S. immigrants. They are the fourth-largest national-origin immigrant group in the country. However, even if they have obtained legal residency and are green card holders (MPI, 2023), no one is believed to be safe from Trump's measures against migrants (Inquirer, 2025). 

At the moment, there are sixteen Filipinos in the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, fifteen of whom have deportation orders and one with a pending case. Still, the issue is that all those were processed during the Biden administration (Inquirer, 2025), making the one pending case more uncertain. 

Trump's portrayal of immigrants as a threat to the United States completely ignored the historical reality of immigration’s role, especially that of Filipinos. 

Filipinos are known to be migratory. It is the largest exporter of nurses globally, with data from 2020 saying that approximately 240,000 Filipino nurses work abroad. This comes to a point where a mini-documentary series by CBS News called Filipino nurses: the unsung backbone of the American healthcare system. They comprise about 4% of the healthcare workforce (KPIX, 2024). The Filipino nursing exodus did not just happen by coincidence. This phenomenon goes way back through a history of colonisation. 

Through the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the Philippines, a colony of Spain, was sold (my emphasis) to the United States, making it its new territory, marking the end of the Spanish-American War (Eugenio, 2024). Although the United States wanted to portray itself as a friend to the Philippines through this treaty, the ultimately accurate word to use was “sold” because the United States had to pay Spain twenty million dollars (Library of Congress) to take possession of the Philippines. This treaty was blatantly a business deal by nature. Through what then United States President William McKinley called “benevolent assimilation,” the Philippines was now the United States ' colony. With him wanting a smooth transition of authority, he pledged the protection of rights and freedom of Filipinos (Eugenio, 2024).

In line with this, his first action was dispatching American teachers to the Philippines to help Filipinos integrate with the American way of life. These teachers are called Thomasites. The Thomasites taught Filipinos how to speak English. Eventually, this led to the natives aspiring for the American Dream (Eugenio, 2024). However, while speaking English benefits many Filipinos in the present, with the call centre industry being the top source of private sector jobs and a sectoral contributor to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (Arasa, 2024), it still poses a problem from the national and educational perspective in the country. For instance, the Philippine 1987 Constitution, the most recent version of the country’s constitution, is all written in English (Official Gazette). While the Constitution declares English to be one of its two official languages, not every Filipino can speak or understand English, and there are 186 languages in the country (Bolongan, 2023). How can one expect a Filipino to be nationalistic when he cannot even understand or, at worst, know his own country’s Constitution? This shows how the American colonial history in the country is one of the significant factors in Filipinos’ continuous search for national identity, posing the question, “What does it mean to be Filipino?” 

Truthfully, education is a weapon. Not in the sense that Nelson Mandela wanted it to be, but in the manner that the United States used it to subjugate the Filipinos. Through Americanized education, Filipinos desired to migrate there during the United States' colonisation of the Philippines (Eugenio, 2024). One might think that capturing people or a country can be done through the strict imposition of power, such as military forces. But this is not the case in the Philippines. The Filipino people were captured and have continuously been so up to this moment through education. Mandela might have meant in his quote, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”, for his people to be educated as a way to liberate themselves from the long-established history of oppression and discrimination. So, the American colonists agree, just from a different perspective and with a different objective. Education is utilised to capture the hearts of Filipinos, telling them that English should be an official language and that the USA is where dreams come true. In his essay, The Miseducation of Filipinos, Renato Constantino (1970) says, “The moulding of men’s minds is the best means of conquest. Education, therefore, serves as a weapon in wars of colonial conquest.”

In addition, the Pensionado Act, enacted by Taft in 1903, allowed qualified Filipinos to pursue their studies in the United States through a scholarship program. They were called pensionados. Even though the main objective of the act was to educate Filipinos on the United States government system so they could implement it in the Philippines upon their return as future leaders, some of these scholars were nursing students who founded seventeen nursing schools from 1903 to 1940 upon returning home (Eugenio, 2024).

Furthermore, even after the liberation of the Philippines from the United States colonial powers in 1946, it remained its source of medical staff. Especially after the Second World War, the USA experienced a medical shortage due to local American nurses leaving their posts due to lower wages and harmful working conditions. Instead of addressing these issues, the USA saw the Philippines as an opportunity to fill this hole. To reinforce this, the Exchange Visitor Program (EVP) was a considerable factor, temporarily allowing foreigners like Filipinos to study and gain work experience in the USA (Eugenio, 2024).

From this historical information, it can be concluded that the USA has been consistent in its efforts to subjugate Filipinos, notably medical labourers, through formal means such as education and scholarship, acts, and programs. None of its actions are deemed cruel and unjust, as it has always been portrayed to be heroic. This also embodies the poem by Rudyard Kipling (1899)  entitled “The White Man's Burden”, which, as the title suggests, the Philippines, being a colony of Spain, was a country to be saved by the USA as it is its duty or burden as a superior being, as white.

Bringing American education to the Philippines resulted in many benefits, especially in the academic and economic situation of the Filipinos. But was Kipling right in portraying the Philippines as a burden to the USA and saying it was its duty to save the country? Did the USA save the country from Spanish colonisation? 

If saving the Philippines meant buying it from Spain and colonising it again but through other methods, Kipling would be right in his poem. However, contrary to what his poem implies, the Philippines, later after the war, became a source of help for the USA when its nurses quit their jobs. The Philippines was no longer a case to be saved, and it never was. Filipino nurses continuously worked as nurses even after the war, which was fueled by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in 1965, along with the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid. Through the INA and the Social Security Amendments, immigrants were hired for their skills, and there was an increased demand for healthcare workers, respectively. This appealed to many Filipinos who wanted to pursue nursing careers and migrate to the USA. This was why, in five years, Filipino nurses in the Philippines grew by 700%, from only 7000 in 1948 to 57,000 in 1953 (Eugenio, 2024). This significant increase showcased how, during this time of new immigration policies in the US, Filipinos indeed were aiming to migrate. They worked hard for it by studying in the Philippines to be qualified to work there.

On the other hand, it is not only the USA that is the reason for the continuous emigration of Filipino nurses. Even the Philippines, or its government, was to blame. When the US immigration policies were developed, the Philippines was under the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos, resulting in unemployment and poverty that prompted Filipinos to leave the country and seek employment elsewhere. This was even more fortified by Marcos’ Labour Export Policy in 1974, which provided opportunities for Filipinos to go abroad. This policy would help boost the country’s economy through the money remittances of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWS) to their families back home.

Considering the history between the Philippines and the United States and the actions the Trump administration is taking against Filipino migrants, it is vital to look through the past and make this an essential factor in deciding whether Filipinos pose a threat to Americans. The incumbent administration ignores the history between the two countries. It thus amplifies social and racial divides and, more importantly, the contribution of Filipino migrants to American society. 

A historical examination specifically of Filipino immigration is not a source of this internal destruction. It is, instead, the institutionalised targeting of immigrant communities that jeopardises the United States' image of a free and democratic country. It is recommended that the American society and its policymakers recognise historical factors when making decisions concerning the Filipino immigrant community and recognise their contributions. The United States of America must prove that it is indeed the greatest country in the history of the world by working towards solutions grounded in the American ideals of liberty and inclusivity without disregarding history. 

References

1. Batalova, J., & Davis, C. (2023, August 8). Filipino immigrants in the United States. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/filipino-immigrants-united-states.

2. Borlongan, A. M. (2023, June 15). There are 186 languages in the Philippines, not just two!. The Manila Times. https://www.manilatimes.net/2023/06/11/opinion/columns/there-are-186-languages-in-the-philippines-not-just-two/1895506.

3. Constantino, R. (1970). The Miseducation of Filipinos. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1(1), 20–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472337085390031.

4. The Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines. Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines. (n.d.). https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/constitutions/1987-constitution/.

5. Debusmann, B., & Wendling, M. (2024, November 18). How would Trump’s promise of mass deportations of migrants work? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9z0lm48ngo.

6. Eugenio, L. J. (2024, October 21). The mass emigration of Filipino nurses to the United States. Harvard International Review. https://hir.harvard.edu/from-us-reign-to-brain-drain-the-mass-emigration-of-filipino-nurses-to-the-united-states/.

7. Garcia, C. (2020, August 27). That “famous” Lincoln quote in Lara Trump’s RNC speech? he never said it. The Week. https://theweek.com/speedreads/934050/that-famous-lincoln-quote-lara-trumps-rnc-speech-never-said.

8. Hayes, C. (2025, March 22). Trump revoking legal status for 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c33706jy774o.

9. Kipling, R. (1899). White Man’s burden. Département d’études du monde anglophone. https://perso.univ-lyon2.fr/~jkempf/kipling.html.

10. KPIX | CBS News Bay Area. (2024, December 7). The History and Heroics of Filipino Nurses. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s08SnCH0Wmk.

11. “No one is safe”: Filipinos in US fear trump immigration crackdown. Inquirer. (2025, February 9). https://globalnation.inquirer.net/263757/no-one-is-safe-filipinos-in-us-fear-trump-immigration-crackdown.

12. Treaty of Paris of 1898. Library of Congress. (n.d.). https://guides.loc.gov/world-of-1898/treaty-of-paris.