With less than a month to go before the 4th Global Filipino Networking Convention in Honolulu opens on September 28, you better register now and make plans to be there. If you haven't attended a Pinoy convention this year or ever, this is the one to go to. It will be the mother of all Pinoy conventions as it will feature one huge conference, the 7th National Empowerment Conference of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA), and dozens of smaller ones on various issues.
The break-out sessions alone are reason enough to attend the convention but in case you haven't quite decided yet, let me provide you with 10 more reasons to attend the convention.
1. Celebrate the Centennial. The Diaspora that has brought about 8.5 million Filipinos to live and work outside the Philippines today all began with fifteen (15) sacadas (the first OFWs -Overseas Filipino Workers) who were brought to Honolulu on December 20, 1906. A feature of the convention is the Centenario Festival on October 1, with centennial exhibits at the Bishop Museum and entertainment provided by ABS-CBN stars and local entertainers. You are here in America because of those 15 intrepid OFWs who came 100 years ago. So celebrate their journey. You likely will not be around for the next centennial.
2. Network with other Pinoys. Bring your calling cards and make perhaps lifetime connections with Pinoys from throughout the US and from all over the world. This is the 4th Global Filipino Networking Convention with the 1st having taken place in San Francisco in August 2002, the 2nd in Manila in December 2003 and the 3rd in January 2005. The 5th is slated to be held in Australia in September 2007.
3. Empower Pinoys. In the 100 years of Filipino history in America, there has never been a national organization of Pinoys like the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) with a national office and presence in Washington DC and 12 active regional chapters throughout the US (for more info, log on to www.naffaa.org). This is the 7th National Empowerment Conference of the NaFFAA after the 1st was held in Washington DC in August of 1997. The 2nd was held a year later also in DC, with the 3rd in New York (1999), the 4th in Las Vegas (2000), the 5th in San Jose (2002), and the 6th in Chicago (2004).
4. Watch the World Premiere of SANDAAN. This is the movie that tells the story of the Filipino American in the last 100 years, produced by Sonny Izon, and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution which is hosting 7 national events to commemorate the Filipino centennial in America.
5. Meet Philippine Officials. Former President Fidel V. Ramos leads an impressive group of current and former Philippine officials who are slated to attend the global convention. Among the current officials are House Speaker Jose De Venecia who will speak in favor of Charter Change with former Senate President Franklin Drilon presenting the argument against the shift to a unicameral parliamentary system. Also attending are government officials like Tourism boss Joseph "Ace" Durano, Philippine Retirement Authority (PRA) head Gen. Edgar Aglipay, Philippine Culture Commission chair Ambeth Ocampo and Ambassador to Britain Ed Espiritu.
6. Meet Filipino American Officials. Former Hawaii Governor Benjamin Cayetano and Hawaii State Senator (and perhaps 1st FilAm Congressman) Ron Menor top this list which include former Washington State Rep. Velma Veloria and former Milpitas Mayor Henry Manayan.
7. Swear in as a Dual Citizen. All the Philippine Consul Generals in the US will attend the convention together with the current RP Ambassador to DC Willy Gaa and they will attend and officiate the mass swearing-in of Dual Citizens which will take place at the convention. If you always wanted to re-acquire your Philippine citizenship, just bring proof of your former citizenship (birth certificate or old Philippine passport) and be sworn in. The convention will also celebrate the Philippine Supreme Court decision affirming the right of dual citizens to vote in Philippine elections.
8. Say Farewell. Former Philippine Ambassador to the US Albert del Rosario will attend the convention to greet old friends from throughout the US whom he became close to during his 5 years of service. He will be especially thanked for stopping Calpers from withdrawing its investments in the Philippines and from stopping the US Senate from killing Philippine tuna exports to the US. Current NaFFAA chair Loida Nicolas Lewis, CEO of the TLC Beatrice multinational conglomerate will also bow out from the post she has held for the past four years. NaFFAA delegates from throughout the US will want to personally thank her for devoting so much of her busy time leading NaFFAA to its growth and expansion.
9. Find out who will succeed Loida. Filipinos love elections and suspense. A highlight of the convention will be the elections for the NaFFAA chair to succeed Loida. Will it be current vice chair Greg Macabenta (the publisher of Filipinas magazine), former vice chair Gloria Caoile (assistant to the AFL-CIO national president), Seattle NaFFAA head (Region 7)Alma Kern, Florida NaFFAA (Region 4) chair Ernie Ramos, Michigan NaFFAA chair (Region 3) chair Ed Navarra, Houston NaFFAA chair (Region 6) Arlene Machetta?
10. It's Hawaii! Hello? Who needs an excuse to go to the Aloha state? It's your chance to wear your old Hawaiian shirts and shorts and enjoy the sunny warm beaches of Waikiki.
What are you waiting for? Log on to www.naffaa.org and register now and then go to expedia, Travelocity, or whatever online travel agency you use and book your flight. Book your room by logging on to www.HiltonHawaiianVillage.com or call 1-800-hiltons and use the code "ABH" to avail of the special rate.
See you there. Mahalo.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
The Most Hated Pinay
At least as far as millions of overseas Filipino workers and their families are concerned, the "Most Hated Pinay" Award goes not to Imelda Marcos or Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo but to Manila society columnist Malu Fernandez.
This dubious honor was attained by Ms. Fernandez with just one article which appeared in her regular Manila Daily Standard (“Fierce and Fabulous”) column which dealt mainly with the hedonistic lifestyles of the Philippine rich and famous. In that piece, “From Boracay to Greece,” which was also featured in the June 2007 issue of People Asia magazine, Fernandez wrote of her travel to Boracay and of her spur of the moment decision while there to spend her Holy Week vacation in Greece.
Fernandez is apparently accustomed to riding in first class or business class but on her flight to Greece, however, she decided to “bravely” fly in economy class. This is how she recounts her trip: “To save on my ticket, I bravely took an economy class seat on Emirates as recommended by my travel agent……However I forgot that the hub was in Dubai and the majority of the OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) were stationed there. The duty-fee shop was overrun with Filipino workers selling cell phones and perfume.
“Meanwhile, I wanted to slash my wrist at the thought of being trapped in a plane with all of them. While I was on the plane (where the seats were so small I had bruises on my legs), my only consolation was the entertainment on the small flat screen in front of me. But it was busted, so I heaved a sigh, popped my sleeping pills and dozed off to the sounds of gum chewing and endless yelling of “HOY! Kumusta ka na? At taga saan ka? Domestic helper ka rin ba?” (“Hey there! How are you? Where are you from? Are you also a domestic helper?) I thought I had died and God had sent me to my very own private hell.”
After a nine-hour flight, Fernandez landed in Greece and quickly “washed the plane off” her as the “Louis Vuittons” under her eyes, she wrote, were “enormous.” Despite the cold, she “bravely went about in a lightweight sweater and a throw.” ("Bravely" is apparently her favorite description of how she does things.)
“On my way back, I had to bravely take the economy flight once more. This time I had already resigned myself to being trapped like a sardine in a sardine can with all these OFWs smelling of AXE and Charlie cologne while Jo Malone evaporated into thin air.”
From Meryl Streep, we learned that the Devil wears Prada. From Malu Fernandez, we know she also wears Jo Malone perfume, which sells for $100 per 100 ml bottle (approximately 5000 pesos), unlike the cheaper Axe and Charlie colognes some OFWs prefer.
As soon as Fernandez’ article was published, word about her condescending depiction of OFWs quickly spread through the Internet to the blogosphere of OFW communities throughout the world, especially to the 1.5 million Filipinos in the Middle East. Through various OFW blogs, hundreds of Filipinos expressed their personal anger at the person they called the “mahaderang matapobre” (a meddlesome person who contemptuously looks down on the poor). [Google the words.]
Francis Sangalang wrote from Dubai: “We are already having a hard time here working under the hot climate then we get a strong below the belt blow by our own kabayan who has totally no idea on being an OFW.” Ingrid Holm, from England, chimed in: “You wrote that you wanted to slit your wrists because you were stuck in coach with all the OFWs. I am moved every time I am on a flight with OFWs. I am reminded of their resilience. Of how hard they work, and how they keep the Philippines going. The economy relies on their bravery. You should have slit your wrists, hon. And you are going to hell if you don’t change the way you think. Think of sitting in coach, imagining your personal hell as a personal foreshadowing.”
The vitriol fueled by her article, which she personally thought was a product of her “acerbic wit”, did not cause Malu Fernandez to back down one bit. Instead she responded by throwing gasoline to the fire: “The bottom line was just that I had offended the reader’s socioeconomic background. If any of these people actually read anything thicker then a magazine they would find it very funny. Most people don’t get the fact that they need bitches like me to shake up their world; otherwise their lives would be boring and mediocre. I obviously write for a certain target audience and if what I write offends you, just stop reading.”
So the lower class OFWs can’t read anything thicker than a magazine, huh? And they should be grateful for self-proclaimed “bitches” like her for making their “boring and mediocre” lives exciting? If there were hundreds of Filipinos denouncing the “mahaderang matapobre” in various blogs and print publications before, her rejoinder caused thousands more to vent their spleen at her utter contempt for the poor. In his blog, Loi Reyes Landicho compiled a list of things for OFWs to tell Malu Fernandez when they see her. On the top of the list was this: “In case you die, we’d like to attend your funeral. However, we’ll probably just go to work that day. You know… business before pleasure.”
The “deeply personal insults” and “death threats” she received eventually caused her to resign from the Manila Daily Standard and People Asia. In her statement which she released in her website, Fernandez wrote: “To say that this article was not meant to malign, hurt or express prejudice against the OFWs now sounds hollow after reading through all the blogs from Filipinos all over the world. I am deeply apologetic for my insensitivity and the offensive manner in which this article was written, I hear you all and I am properly rebuked. It was truly not my intention to malign, hurt or express prejudice against OFWs.”
Even as she "bravely" travels around the world regularly, what Malu Fernandez failed to realize is how much the world she travels in has changed. Twenty years ago she could have written about the “que horror!” of being surrounded by OFWs and gotten away with it. Not anymore. The Internet and the blogosphere it produced, coupled with the economic power of their remittances, have empowered the OFWs and leveled the playing field. It’s not safe to be a “matapobre” now.
This dubious honor was attained by Ms. Fernandez with just one article which appeared in her regular Manila Daily Standard (“Fierce and Fabulous”) column which dealt mainly with the hedonistic lifestyles of the Philippine rich and famous. In that piece, “From Boracay to Greece,” which was also featured in the June 2007 issue of People Asia magazine, Fernandez wrote of her travel to Boracay and of her spur of the moment decision while there to spend her Holy Week vacation in Greece.
Fernandez is apparently accustomed to riding in first class or business class but on her flight to Greece, however, she decided to “bravely” fly in economy class. This is how she recounts her trip: “To save on my ticket, I bravely took an economy class seat on Emirates as recommended by my travel agent……However I forgot that the hub was in Dubai and the majority of the OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) were stationed there. The duty-fee shop was overrun with Filipino workers selling cell phones and perfume.
“Meanwhile, I wanted to slash my wrist at the thought of being trapped in a plane with all of them. While I was on the plane (where the seats were so small I had bruises on my legs), my only consolation was the entertainment on the small flat screen in front of me. But it was busted, so I heaved a sigh, popped my sleeping pills and dozed off to the sounds of gum chewing and endless yelling of “HOY! Kumusta ka na? At taga saan ka? Domestic helper ka rin ba?” (“Hey there! How are you? Where are you from? Are you also a domestic helper?) I thought I had died and God had sent me to my very own private hell.”
After a nine-hour flight, Fernandez landed in Greece and quickly “washed the plane off” her as the “Louis Vuittons” under her eyes, she wrote, were “enormous.” Despite the cold, she “bravely went about in a lightweight sweater and a throw.” ("Bravely" is apparently her favorite description of how she does things.)
“On my way back, I had to bravely take the economy flight once more. This time I had already resigned myself to being trapped like a sardine in a sardine can with all these OFWs smelling of AXE and Charlie cologne while Jo Malone evaporated into thin air.”
From Meryl Streep, we learned that the Devil wears Prada. From Malu Fernandez, we know she also wears Jo Malone perfume, which sells for $100 per 100 ml bottle (approximately 5000 pesos), unlike the cheaper Axe and Charlie colognes some OFWs prefer.
As soon as Fernandez’ article was published, word about her condescending depiction of OFWs quickly spread through the Internet to the blogosphere of OFW communities throughout the world, especially to the 1.5 million Filipinos in the Middle East. Through various OFW blogs, hundreds of Filipinos expressed their personal anger at the person they called the “mahaderang matapobre” (a meddlesome person who contemptuously looks down on the poor). [Google the words.]
Francis Sangalang wrote from Dubai: “We are already having a hard time here working under the hot climate then we get a strong below the belt blow by our own kabayan who has totally no idea on being an OFW.” Ingrid Holm, from England, chimed in: “You wrote that you wanted to slit your wrists because you were stuck in coach with all the OFWs. I am moved every time I am on a flight with OFWs. I am reminded of their resilience. Of how hard they work, and how they keep the Philippines going. The economy relies on their bravery. You should have slit your wrists, hon. And you are going to hell if you don’t change the way you think. Think of sitting in coach, imagining your personal hell as a personal foreshadowing.”
The vitriol fueled by her article, which she personally thought was a product of her “acerbic wit”, did not cause Malu Fernandez to back down one bit. Instead she responded by throwing gasoline to the fire: “The bottom line was just that I had offended the reader’s socioeconomic background. If any of these people actually read anything thicker then a magazine they would find it very funny. Most people don’t get the fact that they need bitches like me to shake up their world; otherwise their lives would be boring and mediocre. I obviously write for a certain target audience and if what I write offends you, just stop reading.”
So the lower class OFWs can’t read anything thicker than a magazine, huh? And they should be grateful for self-proclaimed “bitches” like her for making their “boring and mediocre” lives exciting? If there were hundreds of Filipinos denouncing the “mahaderang matapobre” in various blogs and print publications before, her rejoinder caused thousands more to vent their spleen at her utter contempt for the poor. In his blog, Loi Reyes Landicho compiled a list of things for OFWs to tell Malu Fernandez when they see her. On the top of the list was this: “In case you die, we’d like to attend your funeral. However, we’ll probably just go to work that day. You know… business before pleasure.”
The “deeply personal insults” and “death threats” she received eventually caused her to resign from the Manila Daily Standard and People Asia. In her statement which she released in her website, Fernandez wrote: “To say that this article was not meant to malign, hurt or express prejudice against the OFWs now sounds hollow after reading through all the blogs from Filipinos all over the world. I am deeply apologetic for my insensitivity and the offensive manner in which this article was written, I hear you all and I am properly rebuked. It was truly not my intention to malign, hurt or express prejudice against OFWs.”
Even as she "bravely" travels around the world regularly, what Malu Fernandez failed to realize is how much the world she travels in has changed. Twenty years ago she could have written about the “que horror!” of being surrounded by OFWs and gotten away with it. Not anymore. The Internet and the blogosphere it produced, coupled with the economic power of their remittances, have empowered the OFWs and leveled the playing field. It’s not safe to be a “matapobre” now.
Friday, August 17, 2007
The Ordeal of Ramil
In a press conference in Manila on August 4, Vice President Noli De Castro announced that there were only 11 Filipinos who worked at the US Embassy in Baghdad, not 51 as reported by John Owens and Roy J. Mayberry, two former employees of the Kuwaiti firm, in sworn testimonies at a US congressional committee last July 26.
Vice President De Castro, the chief presidential adviser on overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), apparently learned this from reading the full-page ads that First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Company ran in five leading newspapers. The ads staunchly denied the allegations of Owens and Mayberry that First Kuwaiti had kidnapped 51 Filipino workers and forced them to work under inhumane working conditions on their $592-M US Embassy project in Baghdad. First Kuwaiti claimed that the Filipino workers “willingly agreed to work in Iraq before their departure and before they arrived at the site of the embassy.”
Perhaps the Vice President should be forgiven his gullibility because his previous job in the private sector, as a TV anchorman ("Magandang Gabi, Bayan"), consisted of reading the nightly news on the teleprompter, not investigating the truth behind the news reports he read on air.
Perhaps he should have spoken with Ricardo Endaya, Philippine Ambassador to Kuwait, who had recommended to the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs as early as March 2006 that First Kuwaiti be put on a watch list for violations of the government ban on the deployment of Filipinos to Iraq. “Way back in 2004 when I was Charge d’Affaires in Baghdad, I investigated complaints of OFWs against First Kuwaiti for violation of employment contracts involving salary, overtime pay and accommodations,” Endaya said.
But the Vice President need not have even gone all the way to the Middle East; he could have just watched the new documentary "Someone Else's War" currently circulating in the Philippines and at US film festivals. The film features the true story of Ramil Autencio, a Filipino who worked for First Kuwaiti in Iraq.
Ramil’s ordeal was relayed to me by David Phinney, a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington, DC, whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and on ABC and PBS. Phinney read my column last week (“What Price of Remittances?”) and contacted me to inform me about Ramil, whom he had interviewed for a story he wrote in October, 2005.
"The promise to build a better life in the Philippines for himself and his young family took Ramil Autencio to Kuwait. He never suspected that a month after leaving home in December 2003, he would be living a wartime nightmare in northern Iraq, pushing boulders 11 hours a day, seven days a week for a contractor fortifying a US military camp in Tikrit,” Phinney wrote.
"Showers to wash off the day’s sweat were an uncertainty, and in the chilly January and February nights of 2004, he and seven other Filipinos would live in an empty truck with no windows, sleep on cardboard boxes for a bed, and eat leftovers and meals-ready-to-eat from soldiers. It was the only way to have enough food. He says crackling gunfire and crashing incoming mortar would wake him at all hours of the night and the unfortified trailer would tremble and shake from nearby rocket blasts.”
This was not what he had bargained for, Ramil told Phinney. An air conditioning repairman and technician, he had signed a two-year contract to work at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait for $450 a month. But when he arrived at the Kuwait airport, Ramil was quickly hustled over to a rundown apartment building managed by First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, a Kuwaiti firm doing a booming multimillion-dollar business with the US military and the Pentagon’s primary support contractor, Halliburton.
To date, Phinney reports, First Kuwaiti has already billed the US government $2 billion for its work in Iraq, including the $592-million US Embassy in Baghdad now nearing completion.
Ramil was informed that there were no more jobs at the hotel in Kuwait and because his recruiter had processed only a one-month travel visa for him, he could not work in Kuwait. He had three options: pay a $1,000 penalty and work in Kuwait for free for six months, be arrested and jailed, or work in Iraq. As he pondered these choices, Ramil lived in an apartment building in Kuwait, without mattresses or blankets, with 800 other Filipinos. They would eat only chicken and rice under the building’s crumbling ceilings. One Filipino worker lost his mind and died in the building, Ramil recalled.
“A jail would be better,” Ramil told Phinney. “The building was so crowded, you could barely breathe.” Finally, one day, a supervisor presented him with some papers for him to sign. “I don’t read Arabic or English, but it was that, or jail,” Ramil signed and, together with other Filipinos, were then brought to a bus bound for Tikrit in Iraq.
Upon arrival in Tikrit, Ramil and the other Filipinos were forced to work 11 hour days, 7 days a week but were not paid as they were told the money would be waiting for them in Kuwait. As months passed and the conditions became increasingly unbearable for him and the Filipinos working with him, Ramil decided to find some way to escape from Tikrit.
He passed out a crumpled yellow piece of paper to his fellow Filipinos, asking them to join his escape back to Kuwait. About 40 Filipinos signed up. He then got a sympathetic Filipino soldier in the US Army to convince the driver of a flatbed truck headed south towards the Kuwaiti border to give them a ride. For three nights they rode in darkness, packed tight in an empty transport container with very little food or water. “We were nearly starved,” Ramil told Phinney.
Phinney reported: When they arrived at the border, the sheer number of desperate Filipinos arriving without papers stunned the Kuwaiti police. “We were even angrier then because one of us had died so there was nothing they could do to stop us,” Ramil recounted. “We pushed them away when they asked for our papers.... We outnumbered them.”
The group somehow made their way to the Philippine Embassy, where the ambassador provided them with shelter until their return home could be arranged.
Ramil received only $300 for his entire three-month ordeal. He now lives in a shanty in Manila about a mile from the place where Vice President De Castro held his press conference. The Veep doesn't need to walk a mile on a camel to talk to Ramil himself.
Vice President De Castro, the chief presidential adviser on overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), apparently learned this from reading the full-page ads that First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Company ran in five leading newspapers. The ads staunchly denied the allegations of Owens and Mayberry that First Kuwaiti had kidnapped 51 Filipino workers and forced them to work under inhumane working conditions on their $592-M US Embassy project in Baghdad. First Kuwaiti claimed that the Filipino workers “willingly agreed to work in Iraq before their departure and before they arrived at the site of the embassy.”
Perhaps the Vice President should be forgiven his gullibility because his previous job in the private sector, as a TV anchorman ("Magandang Gabi, Bayan"), consisted of reading the nightly news on the teleprompter, not investigating the truth behind the news reports he read on air.
Perhaps he should have spoken with Ricardo Endaya, Philippine Ambassador to Kuwait, who had recommended to the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs as early as March 2006 that First Kuwaiti be put on a watch list for violations of the government ban on the deployment of Filipinos to Iraq. “Way back in 2004 when I was Charge d’Affaires in Baghdad, I investigated complaints of OFWs against First Kuwaiti for violation of employment contracts involving salary, overtime pay and accommodations,” Endaya said.
But the Vice President need not have even gone all the way to the Middle East; he could have just watched the new documentary "Someone Else's War" currently circulating in the Philippines and at US film festivals. The film features the true story of Ramil Autencio, a Filipino who worked for First Kuwaiti in Iraq.
Ramil’s ordeal was relayed to me by David Phinney, a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington, DC, whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and on ABC and PBS. Phinney read my column last week (“What Price of Remittances?”) and contacted me to inform me about Ramil, whom he had interviewed for a story he wrote in October, 2005.
"The promise to build a better life in the Philippines for himself and his young family took Ramil Autencio to Kuwait. He never suspected that a month after leaving home in December 2003, he would be living a wartime nightmare in northern Iraq, pushing boulders 11 hours a day, seven days a week for a contractor fortifying a US military camp in Tikrit,” Phinney wrote.
"Showers to wash off the day’s sweat were an uncertainty, and in the chilly January and February nights of 2004, he and seven other Filipinos would live in an empty truck with no windows, sleep on cardboard boxes for a bed, and eat leftovers and meals-ready-to-eat from soldiers. It was the only way to have enough food. He says crackling gunfire and crashing incoming mortar would wake him at all hours of the night and the unfortified trailer would tremble and shake from nearby rocket blasts.”
This was not what he had bargained for, Ramil told Phinney. An air conditioning repairman and technician, he had signed a two-year contract to work at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait for $450 a month. But when he arrived at the Kuwait airport, Ramil was quickly hustled over to a rundown apartment building managed by First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, a Kuwaiti firm doing a booming multimillion-dollar business with the US military and the Pentagon’s primary support contractor, Halliburton.
To date, Phinney reports, First Kuwaiti has already billed the US government $2 billion for its work in Iraq, including the $592-million US Embassy in Baghdad now nearing completion.
Ramil was informed that there were no more jobs at the hotel in Kuwait and because his recruiter had processed only a one-month travel visa for him, he could not work in Kuwait. He had three options: pay a $1,000 penalty and work in Kuwait for free for six months, be arrested and jailed, or work in Iraq. As he pondered these choices, Ramil lived in an apartment building in Kuwait, without mattresses or blankets, with 800 other Filipinos. They would eat only chicken and rice under the building’s crumbling ceilings. One Filipino worker lost his mind and died in the building, Ramil recalled.
“A jail would be better,” Ramil told Phinney. “The building was so crowded, you could barely breathe.” Finally, one day, a supervisor presented him with some papers for him to sign. “I don’t read Arabic or English, but it was that, or jail,” Ramil signed and, together with other Filipinos, were then brought to a bus bound for Tikrit in Iraq.
Upon arrival in Tikrit, Ramil and the other Filipinos were forced to work 11 hour days, 7 days a week but were not paid as they were told the money would be waiting for them in Kuwait. As months passed and the conditions became increasingly unbearable for him and the Filipinos working with him, Ramil decided to find some way to escape from Tikrit.
He passed out a crumpled yellow piece of paper to his fellow Filipinos, asking them to join his escape back to Kuwait. About 40 Filipinos signed up. He then got a sympathetic Filipino soldier in the US Army to convince the driver of a flatbed truck headed south towards the Kuwaiti border to give them a ride. For three nights they rode in darkness, packed tight in an empty transport container with very little food or water. “We were nearly starved,” Ramil told Phinney.
Phinney reported: When they arrived at the border, the sheer number of desperate Filipinos arriving without papers stunned the Kuwaiti police. “We were even angrier then because one of us had died so there was nothing they could do to stop us,” Ramil recounted. “We pushed them away when they asked for our papers.... We outnumbered them.”
The group somehow made their way to the Philippine Embassy, where the ambassador provided them with shelter until their return home could be arranged.
Ramil received only $300 for his entire three-month ordeal. He now lives in a shanty in Manila about a mile from the place where Vice President De Castro held his press conference. The Veep doesn't need to walk a mile on a camel to talk to Ramil himself.
Monday, August 13, 2007
The Price of Remittances
While balikbayan visitors from the US may complain that they’re buying less with their dollar than they used to because the peso has improved from 53 to 1 to 45 to 1, it’s an accomplishment of the current Philippine government that the strong peso requires it to expend less to pay off its foreign debt, leaving more for infrastructure improvements.
By all accounts, this improvement in the economy is owed chiefly to the $15-B in annual remittances that more than two million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) send back to their families in the Philippines. But what is the price that they have to pay for these Philippine economy-saving remittances?
While many of them have found great jobs as nurses or engineers, others are not so fortunate. Two reports about these OFWs, which appeared the past week in the mainstream media in the US, provide us with a glimpse of their lives and the human costs of their remittances.
The first report originally appeared on July 26 on Youtube - www.youtube.com - increasingly the source of news by CNN and other mainstream media. The video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evRPwwyno_c was of a US House hearing where an eyewitness testified about the brutal conditions that 51 Filipino workers were subjected to in Baghdad while working on the $600-M US Embassy construction there.
The witness, an American medical technician, Roy Mayberry, was hired by the First Kuwaiti Company to work as an emergency medic for its contract in Baghdad. On the first day he reported to the company in Kawait, he was brought to a room with 51 Filipinos who told him they were bound for Dubai to work in hotels there. They showed their plane tickets to him which showed Dubai as their destination.
After they boarded the plane and the pilot announced that the next stop was Baghdad, “all you know what broke loose on the plane”, Mayberry reported, as the Pinoys screamed and demanded to be flown to Dubai. They returned to their seats only after security officials pointed their MP-5 submachine guns at the men and ordered them to do so.
"I believe these men were kidnapped by the First Kuwaiti Company to work on the US Embassy in Baghdad," Mayberry told the congressional committee. These men could do nothing, he said, but accept their fate. Their passports had been taken away from them in Kuwait. Their fate was to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with only short breaks in between. They could complain only on pain of being verbally and physically abused, or fined with huge wage deductions.
“They had no IDs, no passports, and were being smuggled past US security forces,” Maybery said. He also testified that while he had his own trailer at the construction site, the Filipinos were packed 20 to 30 people in one trailer.
“Everyday, they went out to work without proper safety equipment. I went to the construction site to watch. There were a lot of injuries out there because of conditions these men were forced to work in,” he said. They were working “without shoes, without gloves, no safety harnesses.”
He said he often saw the Filipino workers with their toes wrapped around scaffoldings “like a bunch of birds…One guy was up there intoxicated with pain killers and I had to yell and scream for 10 minutes until they got him down,” he said.
This wholesale kidnapping of Filipinos occurred a year ago but was only revealed to the world during the July 26 US congressional hearing. When confronted about this disclosure, a First Kuwaiti Company spokesman denied that it had any Filipino employees.
The second report on Filipinos came on August 8 when Dateline NBC devoted a full hour on prime time to the dramatic rescue of Lannie Ejercito, a 22-year old Filipina “sex slave” in Malaysia http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20185681. NBC Dateline host Ann Curry reported that the girl, “just one among hundreds of thousands of girls who are poor, helpless and naïve, preyed on by human traffickers” had one thing going for her. She had an aunt, Ravina, who is married to “Troop” Edmonds, a retired former US Marine officer living in Oregon.
On October 5, 2006, they receive a panicked call from overseas. “Get me out of here” was her anguished plea. The call came from Ravina’s niece, Lannie, whom they had financed her through nursing school. When she failed the national nursing exam, Lannie pursued a career as a hotel singer and was eventually contracted to sing in Malaysia.
But when she arrived in Malaysia, she learned that singing was not on the mind of her employer, who confiscated her passport and forced her to sign an 8-year contract that required her to work until she paid back the $80,000 which her employer said he had paid for her. It would be work not as a singer but as a prostitute.
Ravina told her husband to go to Malaysia to rescue Lannie and not come back without her. With that assignment, Troop recruited Jerry Howe, a buddy who was a retired FBI agent and they, together with a Dateline NBC film crew flew to Lannie’s hometown of Cebu to obtain clues on Lannie’s whereabouts.
After interviewing a Pinay who had recruited Lannie, the Americans and the TV crew went to Kuala Lumpur. With clever sleuthing and the reluctant aid of the local police, they managed to safely rescue Lannie.
There were 15 other Filipino “sex slaves” similarly living in “debt bondage” with her in an apartment, Lannie told them, but the Americans decided that it would be too risky to stay in Malaysia and attempt to rescue them as well. They quickly departed Malaysia and safely returned Lannie to her parents in Cebu.
Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hanson also reported on the side story of “Ann,” a Filipina who was a virgin when she was sold into “debt bondage” in Malaysia. Her virginity was sold for $80, she said, and she was forced to work as a prostitute until she managed to contact the Philippine Embassy which rescued her. By then, she said, she had contracted AIDS and was of no use to her employer.
At the end of the Dateline NBC program, my tears flowed freely just as they did when I watched Mayberry’s report about the Filipinos in Baghdad. Is the price of huge remittances from overseas Filipino workers worth all the pain and suffering many have to endure?
By all accounts, this improvement in the economy is owed chiefly to the $15-B in annual remittances that more than two million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) send back to their families in the Philippines. But what is the price that they have to pay for these Philippine economy-saving remittances?
While many of them have found great jobs as nurses or engineers, others are not so fortunate. Two reports about these OFWs, which appeared the past week in the mainstream media in the US, provide us with a glimpse of their lives and the human costs of their remittances.
The first report originally appeared on July 26 on Youtube - www.youtube.com - increasingly the source of news by CNN and other mainstream media. The video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evRPwwyno_c was of a US House hearing where an eyewitness testified about the brutal conditions that 51 Filipino workers were subjected to in Baghdad while working on the $600-M US Embassy construction there.
The witness, an American medical technician, Roy Mayberry, was hired by the First Kuwaiti Company to work as an emergency medic for its contract in Baghdad. On the first day he reported to the company in Kawait, he was brought to a room with 51 Filipinos who told him they were bound for Dubai to work in hotels there. They showed their plane tickets to him which showed Dubai as their destination.
After they boarded the plane and the pilot announced that the next stop was Baghdad, “all you know what broke loose on the plane”, Mayberry reported, as the Pinoys screamed and demanded to be flown to Dubai. They returned to their seats only after security officials pointed their MP-5 submachine guns at the men and ordered them to do so.
"I believe these men were kidnapped by the First Kuwaiti Company to work on the US Embassy in Baghdad," Mayberry told the congressional committee. These men could do nothing, he said, but accept their fate. Their passports had been taken away from them in Kuwait. Their fate was to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with only short breaks in between. They could complain only on pain of being verbally and physically abused, or fined with huge wage deductions.
“They had no IDs, no passports, and were being smuggled past US security forces,” Maybery said. He also testified that while he had his own trailer at the construction site, the Filipinos were packed 20 to 30 people in one trailer.
“Everyday, they went out to work without proper safety equipment. I went to the construction site to watch. There were a lot of injuries out there because of conditions these men were forced to work in,” he said. They were working “without shoes, without gloves, no safety harnesses.”
He said he often saw the Filipino workers with their toes wrapped around scaffoldings “like a bunch of birds…One guy was up there intoxicated with pain killers and I had to yell and scream for 10 minutes until they got him down,” he said.
This wholesale kidnapping of Filipinos occurred a year ago but was only revealed to the world during the July 26 US congressional hearing. When confronted about this disclosure, a First Kuwaiti Company spokesman denied that it had any Filipino employees.
The second report on Filipinos came on August 8 when Dateline NBC devoted a full hour on prime time to the dramatic rescue of Lannie Ejercito, a 22-year old Filipina “sex slave” in Malaysia http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20185681. NBC Dateline host Ann Curry reported that the girl, “just one among hundreds of thousands of girls who are poor, helpless and naïve, preyed on by human traffickers” had one thing going for her. She had an aunt, Ravina, who is married to “Troop” Edmonds, a retired former US Marine officer living in Oregon.
On October 5, 2006, they receive a panicked call from overseas. “Get me out of here” was her anguished plea. The call came from Ravina’s niece, Lannie, whom they had financed her through nursing school. When she failed the national nursing exam, Lannie pursued a career as a hotel singer and was eventually contracted to sing in Malaysia.
But when she arrived in Malaysia, she learned that singing was not on the mind of her employer, who confiscated her passport and forced her to sign an 8-year contract that required her to work until she paid back the $80,000 which her employer said he had paid for her. It would be work not as a singer but as a prostitute.
Ravina told her husband to go to Malaysia to rescue Lannie and not come back without her. With that assignment, Troop recruited Jerry Howe, a buddy who was a retired FBI agent and they, together with a Dateline NBC film crew flew to Lannie’s hometown of Cebu to obtain clues on Lannie’s whereabouts.
After interviewing a Pinay who had recruited Lannie, the Americans and the TV crew went to Kuala Lumpur. With clever sleuthing and the reluctant aid of the local police, they managed to safely rescue Lannie.
There were 15 other Filipino “sex slaves” similarly living in “debt bondage” with her in an apartment, Lannie told them, but the Americans decided that it would be too risky to stay in Malaysia and attempt to rescue them as well. They quickly departed Malaysia and safely returned Lannie to her parents in Cebu.
Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hanson also reported on the side story of “Ann,” a Filipina who was a virgin when she was sold into “debt bondage” in Malaysia. Her virginity was sold for $80, she said, and she was forced to work as a prostitute until she managed to contact the Philippine Embassy which rescued her. By then, she said, she had contracted AIDS and was of no use to her employer.
At the end of the Dateline NBC program, my tears flowed freely just as they did when I watched Mayberry’s report about the Filipinos in Baghdad. Is the price of huge remittances from overseas Filipino workers worth all the pain and suffering many have to endure?
Monday, July 30, 2007
Connecting the Dots
The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia informs us that Philippine publicist Salvador “Bubby” Dacer was murdered on November 24, 2000 by members of the Philippine National Police (PNP): “Bubby Dacer and his driver, Emmanuel Corbito, were abducted in Makati. They were later killed, and their vehicle dumped.
In 2001, a number of arrests were made One of the accused, police colonel Glenn Dumlao named Cesar Mancao and Michael Ray Aquino as the organizers of the murders. Mancao and Aquino both fled the country. Dumlao later disappeared.
Wikipedia further notes: “The ultimate reasons for Dacer's murder remain a subject of debate. (former Philippine president) Fidel Ramos has publicly accused his successor, Joseph Estrada, of giving the original order — Estrada was mired in a corruption scandal at the time, and according to some reports, believed Dacer was helping Ramos destabilize his rule.
Panfilo Lacson, then a top police officer (now a senator), is also accused by some. Dacer had worked for Roberto Lastimoso, an enemy of Lacson, and according to Dacer's daughter Amparo, Dacer had evidence of crimes committed by Lacson.”
Two weeks ago on July 18, 2007, former PNP Col. Michael Ray Aquino was sentenced to six years and four months in prison by US Judge William Walls in New Jersey for his role in a plot where he obtained secret US documents in an effort to undermine the Philippine government. Before the sentence was rendered, however, US Attorney Christopher J. Christie submitted a 92-page memorandum asking for a higher sentence for Aquino because of “Aquino’s involvement in the abduction and murders of Dacer and Corbito.” Aquino's lawyer had asked for a sentence of less than four years.
The Memorandum, a copy of which was obtained by this writer, noted that PNP Col. Glenn Dumlao had submitted a sworn statement on June 21, 2001 implicating Aquino and Col. Cezar Mancao in the murders of Dacer and Corbito. Col. Dumlao fled to the US in 2001 and was also contacted by US Attorney Christie during the government’s investigation of Aquino. In an interview in 2006 in New Jersey with his lawyer Felix Vinluan present, "Dumlao affirmed that Aquino participated in the abduction of Dacer-Corbito by directing him and others to kidnap and interrogate Dacer and Corbito, and destroy evidence of the crime.”
According to the government's Memorandum, Dumlao voluntarily provided detailed information to the US government about his and Aquino’s participation in the double murders. Col. Mancao, who fled to the US with Aquino in 2001, was also contacted by the US Attorney in 2006. “Likewise," the Memorandum stated, "Mancao voluntarily submitted to several interviews with the (US) government (in the presence of his attorney, Michael Schutt). During those interviews, Mancao told the government, among other things, that he believed that Aquino was involved in the abductions of Dacer and Corbito because Aquino told him that he had ordered others to hide evidence of the crimes.”
Aquino’s role in the murders was as “coordinator” of the “PAOCTF men in charge of abducting Dacer.” The PAOCTF (Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force) was headed at the time by Gen. Panfilo Lacson. The Memorandum noted that Aquino “gave direct orders” to the participants and “was obviously stage-managing the entire operation via cellular telephone that culminated in their slayings.” The memorandum noted further that “in the face multiple investigations for his involvement in, among other things, the KB (Kuratong Baleleng) Incident, the Dacer-Corbito murders, and the State of Rebellion charges, Aquino (together with Mancao) fled the Philippines on or about June 21, 2001” and went to the US on tourist visas.
“Mancao affirmed that he and Aquino ‘heard’ from Lacson that they would be arrested ‘in an effort to destroy Lacson’s reputation and negatively affect Lacson’s possible chances of a presidential bid in 2004’…Lacson later directed Aquino and Mancao to leave the country.”
In the section “Aquino Acts as Lacson’s Agent After Fleeing from the RP,” the Memorandum detailed the activities of Aquino fter moving to New York. When Lacson traveled to the US in September of 2003, Aquino went with him to Florida to meet with Mark Jimenez before Jimenez was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for tax evasion and election fraud.
Leandro Aragoncillo, Aquino’s co-defendant who was sentenced to 10 years for espionage by the same federal judge, acknowledged that Aquino was the one who informed him in September of 2003 about Lacson’s visit to Jimenez, the
Memorandum noted, “belying Aquino’s assertion that he had limited contact with Aragoncillo prior to January 2005.”
In January of 2005, Aquino introduced Aragoncillo to Lacson as a “US Marine who was assigned to an FBI intelligence unit”. Aquino told Lacson that Aragoncillo wanted to provide Lacson with information about “briefings attended by Aragoncillo about the political situation in the Philippines…Specifically,
Aquino wrote that Aragoncillo sought to provide information to Lacson about changing the current RP government with a revolutionary government.”
“Aquino (using his intelligence training) suggested to Lacson that they listen to Aragoncillo and ‘confirm/check’ or vet his information. Foreshadowing efforts to remove President Arroyo, Aquino recommended to Lacson that they use Aragoncillo and his information ‘especially if this will be a catalyst for change in our country’. …Sometime shortly after, Lacson communicated with Aragoncillo.
In turn, Aragoncillo began transmitting classified documents and information, including documents containing national defense information, to both Aquino and Lacson, approximately two weeks later.” Two months later, in March of 2005, Aquino was arrested by US immigration agents for being an overstaying alien. While Aquino was in federal custody,
Aragoncillo visited him, identifying himself to the authorities as an FBI agent. This piqued the immigration officials' interest, causing them to inquire from the FBI about Aragoncillo.
When the FBI conducted its own investigation of Aragoncillo, officials discovered the trail of emails from Aragoncillo to Aquino and Lacson transmitting classified FBI documents.
While in immigration custody, Aquino's bail was set at $50,000 which required a posting of 10% to the bail bondsman. The Memorandum noted that it was Lacson who sent the money to Mancao in Florida to send to Aquino’s family in New York for Aquino’s bailout.
As a result of the FBI investigation, both Aquino and Aragoncillo were arrested by US authorities in September of 2005 and charged with espionage and conspiracy. Lacson was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Just before the US Attorney Karl Buch was set to travel to the Philippines to depose Lacson, Aquino pled guilty to the charges against him, saving Lacson from the humiliation and legal complication of having to subject himself to a deposition. Like a good samurai, Aquino had fallen on the sword for his Emperor.
The Los Angeles-based daughter of Bubby Dacer, Carina, is not satisfied with the sentence of Aquino. “He only receives orders. Like everyone else who was jailed for my father’s murder, they only took orders,” she said.
The question remains: who gave the orders to abduct and kill Dacer and Corbito?
In 2001, a number of arrests were made One of the accused, police colonel Glenn Dumlao named Cesar Mancao and Michael Ray Aquino as the organizers of the murders. Mancao and Aquino both fled the country. Dumlao later disappeared.
Wikipedia further notes: “The ultimate reasons for Dacer's murder remain a subject of debate. (former Philippine president) Fidel Ramos has publicly accused his successor, Joseph Estrada, of giving the original order — Estrada was mired in a corruption scandal at the time, and according to some reports, believed Dacer was helping Ramos destabilize his rule.
Panfilo Lacson, then a top police officer (now a senator), is also accused by some. Dacer had worked for Roberto Lastimoso, an enemy of Lacson, and according to Dacer's daughter Amparo, Dacer had evidence of crimes committed by Lacson.”
Two weeks ago on July 18, 2007, former PNP Col. Michael Ray Aquino was sentenced to six years and four months in prison by US Judge William Walls in New Jersey for his role in a plot where he obtained secret US documents in an effort to undermine the Philippine government. Before the sentence was rendered, however, US Attorney Christopher J. Christie submitted a 92-page memorandum asking for a higher sentence for Aquino because of “Aquino’s involvement in the abduction and murders of Dacer and Corbito.” Aquino's lawyer had asked for a sentence of less than four years.
The Memorandum, a copy of which was obtained by this writer, noted that PNP Col. Glenn Dumlao had submitted a sworn statement on June 21, 2001 implicating Aquino and Col. Cezar Mancao in the murders of Dacer and Corbito. Col. Dumlao fled to the US in 2001 and was also contacted by US Attorney Christie during the government’s investigation of Aquino. In an interview in 2006 in New Jersey with his lawyer Felix Vinluan present, "Dumlao affirmed that Aquino participated in the abduction of Dacer-Corbito by directing him and others to kidnap and interrogate Dacer and Corbito, and destroy evidence of the crime.”
According to the government's Memorandum, Dumlao voluntarily provided detailed information to the US government about his and Aquino’s participation in the double murders. Col. Mancao, who fled to the US with Aquino in 2001, was also contacted by the US Attorney in 2006. “Likewise," the Memorandum stated, "Mancao voluntarily submitted to several interviews with the (US) government (in the presence of his attorney, Michael Schutt). During those interviews, Mancao told the government, among other things, that he believed that Aquino was involved in the abductions of Dacer and Corbito because Aquino told him that he had ordered others to hide evidence of the crimes.”
Aquino’s role in the murders was as “coordinator” of the “PAOCTF men in charge of abducting Dacer.” The PAOCTF (Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force) was headed at the time by Gen. Panfilo Lacson. The Memorandum noted that Aquino “gave direct orders” to the participants and “was obviously stage-managing the entire operation via cellular telephone that culminated in their slayings.” The memorandum noted further that “in the face multiple investigations for his involvement in, among other things, the KB (Kuratong Baleleng) Incident, the Dacer-Corbito murders, and the State of Rebellion charges, Aquino (together with Mancao) fled the Philippines on or about June 21, 2001” and went to the US on tourist visas.
“Mancao affirmed that he and Aquino ‘heard’ from Lacson that they would be arrested ‘in an effort to destroy Lacson’s reputation and negatively affect Lacson’s possible chances of a presidential bid in 2004’…Lacson later directed Aquino and Mancao to leave the country.”
In the section “Aquino Acts as Lacson’s Agent After Fleeing from the RP,” the Memorandum detailed the activities of Aquino fter moving to New York. When Lacson traveled to the US in September of 2003, Aquino went with him to Florida to meet with Mark Jimenez before Jimenez was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for tax evasion and election fraud.
Leandro Aragoncillo, Aquino’s co-defendant who was sentenced to 10 years for espionage by the same federal judge, acknowledged that Aquino was the one who informed him in September of 2003 about Lacson’s visit to Jimenez, the
Memorandum noted, “belying Aquino’s assertion that he had limited contact with Aragoncillo prior to January 2005.”
In January of 2005, Aquino introduced Aragoncillo to Lacson as a “US Marine who was assigned to an FBI intelligence unit”. Aquino told Lacson that Aragoncillo wanted to provide Lacson with information about “briefings attended by Aragoncillo about the political situation in the Philippines…Specifically,
Aquino wrote that Aragoncillo sought to provide information to Lacson about changing the current RP government with a revolutionary government.”
“Aquino (using his intelligence training) suggested to Lacson that they listen to Aragoncillo and ‘confirm/check’ or vet his information. Foreshadowing efforts to remove President Arroyo, Aquino recommended to Lacson that they use Aragoncillo and his information ‘especially if this will be a catalyst for change in our country’. …Sometime shortly after, Lacson communicated with Aragoncillo.
In turn, Aragoncillo began transmitting classified documents and information, including documents containing national defense information, to both Aquino and Lacson, approximately two weeks later.” Two months later, in March of 2005, Aquino was arrested by US immigration agents for being an overstaying alien. While Aquino was in federal custody,
Aragoncillo visited him, identifying himself to the authorities as an FBI agent. This piqued the immigration officials' interest, causing them to inquire from the FBI about Aragoncillo.
When the FBI conducted its own investigation of Aragoncillo, officials discovered the trail of emails from Aragoncillo to Aquino and Lacson transmitting classified FBI documents.
While in immigration custody, Aquino's bail was set at $50,000 which required a posting of 10% to the bail bondsman. The Memorandum noted that it was Lacson who sent the money to Mancao in Florida to send to Aquino’s family in New York for Aquino’s bailout.
As a result of the FBI investigation, both Aquino and Aragoncillo were arrested by US authorities in September of 2005 and charged with espionage and conspiracy. Lacson was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Just before the US Attorney Karl Buch was set to travel to the Philippines to depose Lacson, Aquino pled guilty to the charges against him, saving Lacson from the humiliation and legal complication of having to subject himself to a deposition. Like a good samurai, Aquino had fallen on the sword for his Emperor.
The Los Angeles-based daughter of Bubby Dacer, Carina, is not satisfied with the sentence of Aquino. “He only receives orders. Like everyone else who was jailed for my father’s murder, they only took orders,” she said.
The question remains: who gave the orders to abduct and kill Dacer and Corbito?
Monday, July 16, 2007
The Origins of the Fil Vets' Battle for Equity
When the US House Veterans Affairs Committee convened on July 17 to vote to “mark up” the Filipino Veterans Equity Bill (HR 760) to send it to the full House for a vote, the long battle for justice for the Filipino war veterans came closer to victory than at any other time in its history. A counterpart bill (S. 57) in the US Senate was approved last month by the US Senate Veterans Affairs Committee and is headed for a floor vote in the Senate.
If the House Veterans Affairs Committee, headed by the equity bill’s main sponsor, Rep Bob Filner, marks up HR 760 and it passes a House vote, and S. 57 passes in the Senate as well, a joint Senate-House conference committee will then reconcile differences in their respective versions.
Once a conference-crafted bill is finalized, both chambers will next vote on it. If it passes both chambers, it will then head to the White House for the signature of US Pres. George W. Bush. If Pres. Bush ignores the recommendation of Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson and signs the Filipino Veterans Equity Bill into law, the battle for equity will have finally been won.
The 1946 Origins
The battle for equity began in 1946 when the US Congress passed the Rescission Act on February 18, 1946, a law which deemed service by Filipinos in the US Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) as not to be service in the US Armed Forces for purposes of entitlement to US veterans’ benefits. Filipinos considered this a betrayal of the promise made by US President Franklin Roosevelt on July 26, 1941 when he issued an Order drafting Philippine Commonwealth soldiers into the US Army.
But it was not the first betrayal of a promise. Earlier, in September of 1945, US Attorney-General Tom Clark issued an order revoking the authority of Vice Consul George Ennis, the naturalization officer at the US Embassy in Manila, to process the naturalization applications of Filipino USAFFE veterans. A law passed by the US Congress in 1940 granted US citizenship to Filipinos and other aliens who fought under US command anywhere in the world. All they needed to do was apply to a naturalization officer.
The law was amended in 1942 to set a cut-off date of December 31, 1946 and required that the applicants still remain in active duty when they apply. This revocation of authority was applied only to the Philippines and lasted until August 1946 when the US Embassy finally began accepting and processing applications of Filipino WW II veterans was restored.
In four months, some 4,000 Filipinos under US command applied for and were granted US citizenship. Before these 4,000 Filipino USAFFE soldiers applied for citizenship, some
7,000 Filipinos who had immigrated to the US in the 1920s and 1930s became naturalized US citizens after enlisting and serving in the US Army in the 1st and 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiments.
Marciano Haw Hibi
For more than 20 years after 1946, nothing significant occurred in either reversing the Rescission Act or obtaining naturalization for Filipino WW II veterans. It was not until a veteran named Marciano Haw Hibi arrived in San Francisco as a visitor for business in 1964. With the assistance of his immigration lawyer, Donald Ungar, Haw Hibi filed his application for US naturalization as a Filipino war veteran under the 1940 law. After the naturalization examiner denied his application as Ungar expected, Haw Hibi filed his petition for naturalization in the US District Court in San Francisco on September 13, 1967.
Haw Hibi argued that the US government should be “estopped” (legally precluded) from claiming that he filed his petition 21 years after the cut-off date in 1946 because it was the “affirmative misconduct” of the US government in removing the authority of the naturalization officer in Manila to process his application for US citizenship that caused the delay.
Haw Hibi had enlisted in the Philippine Scouts in February of 1941 after this military force was placed under US command. He was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and released after six months of internment. In April 1945, after the liberation of the Philippines by Allied Forces, Haw Hibi rejoined the Scouts and served until his discharge in December 1945. Although the US naturalization officer in Manila was allowed to process naturalization applications in August of 1946, Haw Hibi was by then no longer eligible to apply as he had been discharged in 1945 and a 1942 amendment required an applicant to still be in active duty at the time of his application.
The District Court denied Haw Hibi's naturalization application, which he then appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. After that appelate court denied his appeal, Haw Hibi appealed his case to the US Supreme Court. On October 23, 1973, the US Supreme Court, in a “per curiam” decision (issued in the name of the whole court rather than by individual justices), affirmed the lower courts’ denial of Haw Hibi’s claim.
Affirmative Misconduct
But it was not a unanimous Court decision. Three U.S. Supreme Court justices - William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan - ruled in favor of Haw Hibi, criticizing the majority’s opinion for ignoring “the deliberate - and successful - effort on the part of agents of the Executive Branch to frustrate the congressional purpose and to deny substantive rights to Filipinos such as respondent by administrative fiat, indicating instead that there was no affirmative misconduct involved in this case. The record does not support that conclusion.”
The dissent in the Haw Hibi case inspired many Filipino veterans in the US to file their applications for naturalization by arguing that they were denied their Due Process and Equal Protection rights under the US Constitution when the executive branch of the US government thwarted the will of legislative branch which “mandated” that a naturalization examiner be present at the US Embassy in Manila to process naturalization applications.
The Renfrew Decision
In 1976, a number of Filipino WW II veterans, including noted Filipino kundiman singer Ruben Tagalog, filed their applications of naturalization in the US District Court in San Francisco after their applications were denied by the INS. (INS officials refer to the Filipino veterans as "Hibi Veterans.") Their cases were consolidated into one (In the Matter of 68 Filipino War Veterans) and assigned to US District Court Judge Charles Renfrew.
Aside from hearing from the government's attorney and from Donald Ungar, the immigration lawyer of the Filipino veterans, Judge Renfrew also allowed Philippine News publisher Alex Esclamado to present oral arguments on behalf of the Filipino veterans. Esclamado's impassioned plea and Ungar's legal arguments combined to cause Judge Renfrew to rule in favor of the Filipino veterans.
Even though the US government appealed the Renfrew Decision, the administration of then US President Jimmy Carter subsequently withdrew the appeal and allowed the 68 Filipino veterans to be sworn in as US citizens. Following the Renfrew Decision, hundreds of other Filipino war veterans then filed their applications. The large number of applicants eventually caused the Carter Administration to reconsider its position.
In 1978, the INS denied the naturalization application of Dr. Sergio Mendoza, a veteran who then petitioned the US District Court to grant his naturalization application. The District Court obliged, ruling that the government was “collaterally estopped” from opposing the naturalization of Filipino war veterans because it withdrew its appeal of the Renfrew Decision. The government then appealed the Mendoza decision to the Ninth Circuit, which affirmed the lower court’s decision.
No Collateral Estoppel
The government then elevated the Mendoza case to the US Supreme Court. On January 10, 1984, a unanimous Supreme Court rendered a decision, penned by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, reversing the lower court’s decision and ruling that the doctrine of collateral estoppel applies only to private litigants and not to the US government.
The Supreme Court’s Mendoza decision did not deter other Filipino WW II veterans from applying for naturalization. Four years after Mendoza, the US Supreme Court in 1988 was faced with the Filipino veterans issue once again, this time involving 16 Filipino war veterans (INS v. Pangilinan) who had successfully argued that federal courts, as courts of equity, could provide an equitable remedy to a legal wrong, which was that the executive branch of the US government had subverted the mandatory language of the 1940 law enacted by the legislative branch of the government by revoking the authority of the Vice Consul at the US Embassy in Manila to process naturalization applications.
Once again, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the Filipino war veterans. In a decision penned by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court ruled that courts do not have the "equitable" power "to confer citizenship in violation of the limitations imposed by Congress in the exercise of its exclusive constitutional authority over naturalization." Pangilinan effectively ended all efforts by Filipino veterans to obtain naturalization through the courts. Relief would now have to come from the US Congress.
Relief sought in Congress
Concerned that hundreds of Filipino war veterans who had applied for naturalization would now be subject to deportation, members of the US Congress led by US Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Rep. Melvyn Dymally (D-California) and Rep. Tom Campbell (R-California) sponsored bills granting naturalization to Filipino WW II veterans. In 1990, they succeeded in getting the Filipino veterans naturalization bill included in the omnibus Immigration Act of 1990.
To secure its inclusion in the omnibus bill, the sponsors assured their colleagues that the naturalization bill would not involve veteran benefits equity issues. At a hearing on the bill, Rep. Campbell stated that giving the Filipino veterans citizenship will not “make them eligible for federal benefits which they do not receive.” The immigration act that was passed by the US Congress and signed into law by US President George H. Bush specifically stipulated that the law “shall not be construed as affecting the rights, privileges or benefits” of the Filipino WW II veterans.
The Filipino veterans had believed that the Rescission Act's discrimination against them was based on the fact that they were not US citizens. Once they became US citizens, the veterans thought, they would now be eligible for the same benefits enjoyed by their American counterparts. Unfortunately, the law retained the discriminatory provisions of the Rescission Act. US citizenship did not solve the problem.
Finally, 61 years after passage of the Rescission Act, the surviving Filipino war veterans may see its end.
If the House Veterans Affairs Committee, headed by the equity bill’s main sponsor, Rep Bob Filner, marks up HR 760 and it passes a House vote, and S. 57 passes in the Senate as well, a joint Senate-House conference committee will then reconcile differences in their respective versions.
Once a conference-crafted bill is finalized, both chambers will next vote on it. If it passes both chambers, it will then head to the White House for the signature of US Pres. George W. Bush. If Pres. Bush ignores the recommendation of Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson and signs the Filipino Veterans Equity Bill into law, the battle for equity will have finally been won.
The 1946 Origins
The battle for equity began in 1946 when the US Congress passed the Rescission Act on February 18, 1946, a law which deemed service by Filipinos in the US Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) as not to be service in the US Armed Forces for purposes of entitlement to US veterans’ benefits. Filipinos considered this a betrayal of the promise made by US President Franklin Roosevelt on July 26, 1941 when he issued an Order drafting Philippine Commonwealth soldiers into the US Army.
But it was not the first betrayal of a promise. Earlier, in September of 1945, US Attorney-General Tom Clark issued an order revoking the authority of Vice Consul George Ennis, the naturalization officer at the US Embassy in Manila, to process the naturalization applications of Filipino USAFFE veterans. A law passed by the US Congress in 1940 granted US citizenship to Filipinos and other aliens who fought under US command anywhere in the world. All they needed to do was apply to a naturalization officer.
The law was amended in 1942 to set a cut-off date of December 31, 1946 and required that the applicants still remain in active duty when they apply. This revocation of authority was applied only to the Philippines and lasted until August 1946 when the US Embassy finally began accepting and processing applications of Filipino WW II veterans was restored.
In four months, some 4,000 Filipinos under US command applied for and were granted US citizenship. Before these 4,000 Filipino USAFFE soldiers applied for citizenship, some
7,000 Filipinos who had immigrated to the US in the 1920s and 1930s became naturalized US citizens after enlisting and serving in the US Army in the 1st and 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiments.
Marciano Haw Hibi
For more than 20 years after 1946, nothing significant occurred in either reversing the Rescission Act or obtaining naturalization for Filipino WW II veterans. It was not until a veteran named Marciano Haw Hibi arrived in San Francisco as a visitor for business in 1964. With the assistance of his immigration lawyer, Donald Ungar, Haw Hibi filed his application for US naturalization as a Filipino war veteran under the 1940 law. After the naturalization examiner denied his application as Ungar expected, Haw Hibi filed his petition for naturalization in the US District Court in San Francisco on September 13, 1967.
Haw Hibi argued that the US government should be “estopped” (legally precluded) from claiming that he filed his petition 21 years after the cut-off date in 1946 because it was the “affirmative misconduct” of the US government in removing the authority of the naturalization officer in Manila to process his application for US citizenship that caused the delay.
Haw Hibi had enlisted in the Philippine Scouts in February of 1941 after this military force was placed under US command. He was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and released after six months of internment. In April 1945, after the liberation of the Philippines by Allied Forces, Haw Hibi rejoined the Scouts and served until his discharge in December 1945. Although the US naturalization officer in Manila was allowed to process naturalization applications in August of 1946, Haw Hibi was by then no longer eligible to apply as he had been discharged in 1945 and a 1942 amendment required an applicant to still be in active duty at the time of his application.
The District Court denied Haw Hibi's naturalization application, which he then appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. After that appelate court denied his appeal, Haw Hibi appealed his case to the US Supreme Court. On October 23, 1973, the US Supreme Court, in a “per curiam” decision (issued in the name of the whole court rather than by individual justices), affirmed the lower courts’ denial of Haw Hibi’s claim.
Affirmative Misconduct
But it was not a unanimous Court decision. Three U.S. Supreme Court justices - William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan - ruled in favor of Haw Hibi, criticizing the majority’s opinion for ignoring “the deliberate - and successful - effort on the part of agents of the Executive Branch to frustrate the congressional purpose and to deny substantive rights to Filipinos such as respondent by administrative fiat, indicating instead that there was no affirmative misconduct involved in this case. The record does not support that conclusion.”
The dissent in the Haw Hibi case inspired many Filipino veterans in the US to file their applications for naturalization by arguing that they were denied their Due Process and Equal Protection rights under the US Constitution when the executive branch of the US government thwarted the will of legislative branch which “mandated” that a naturalization examiner be present at the US Embassy in Manila to process naturalization applications.
The Renfrew Decision
In 1976, a number of Filipino WW II veterans, including noted Filipino kundiman singer Ruben Tagalog, filed their applications of naturalization in the US District Court in San Francisco after their applications were denied by the INS. (INS officials refer to the Filipino veterans as "Hibi Veterans.") Their cases were consolidated into one (In the Matter of 68 Filipino War Veterans) and assigned to US District Court Judge Charles Renfrew.
Aside from hearing from the government's attorney and from Donald Ungar, the immigration lawyer of the Filipino veterans, Judge Renfrew also allowed Philippine News publisher Alex Esclamado to present oral arguments on behalf of the Filipino veterans. Esclamado's impassioned plea and Ungar's legal arguments combined to cause Judge Renfrew to rule in favor of the Filipino veterans.
Even though the US government appealed the Renfrew Decision, the administration of then US President Jimmy Carter subsequently withdrew the appeal and allowed the 68 Filipino veterans to be sworn in as US citizens. Following the Renfrew Decision, hundreds of other Filipino war veterans then filed their applications. The large number of applicants eventually caused the Carter Administration to reconsider its position.
In 1978, the INS denied the naturalization application of Dr. Sergio Mendoza, a veteran who then petitioned the US District Court to grant his naturalization application. The District Court obliged, ruling that the government was “collaterally estopped” from opposing the naturalization of Filipino war veterans because it withdrew its appeal of the Renfrew Decision. The government then appealed the Mendoza decision to the Ninth Circuit, which affirmed the lower court’s decision.
No Collateral Estoppel
The government then elevated the Mendoza case to the US Supreme Court. On January 10, 1984, a unanimous Supreme Court rendered a decision, penned by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, reversing the lower court’s decision and ruling that the doctrine of collateral estoppel applies only to private litigants and not to the US government.
The Supreme Court’s Mendoza decision did not deter other Filipino WW II veterans from applying for naturalization. Four years after Mendoza, the US Supreme Court in 1988 was faced with the Filipino veterans issue once again, this time involving 16 Filipino war veterans (INS v. Pangilinan) who had successfully argued that federal courts, as courts of equity, could provide an equitable remedy to a legal wrong, which was that the executive branch of the US government had subverted the mandatory language of the 1940 law enacted by the legislative branch of the government by revoking the authority of the Vice Consul at the US Embassy in Manila to process naturalization applications.
Once again, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the Filipino war veterans. In a decision penned by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court ruled that courts do not have the "equitable" power "to confer citizenship in violation of the limitations imposed by Congress in the exercise of its exclusive constitutional authority over naturalization." Pangilinan effectively ended all efforts by Filipino veterans to obtain naturalization through the courts. Relief would now have to come from the US Congress.
Relief sought in Congress
Concerned that hundreds of Filipino war veterans who had applied for naturalization would now be subject to deportation, members of the US Congress led by US Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Rep. Melvyn Dymally (D-California) and Rep. Tom Campbell (R-California) sponsored bills granting naturalization to Filipino WW II veterans. In 1990, they succeeded in getting the Filipino veterans naturalization bill included in the omnibus Immigration Act of 1990.
To secure its inclusion in the omnibus bill, the sponsors assured their colleagues that the naturalization bill would not involve veteran benefits equity issues. At a hearing on the bill, Rep. Campbell stated that giving the Filipino veterans citizenship will not “make them eligible for federal benefits which they do not receive.” The immigration act that was passed by the US Congress and signed into law by US President George H. Bush specifically stipulated that the law “shall not be construed as affecting the rights, privileges or benefits” of the Filipino WW II veterans.
The Filipino veterans had believed that the Rescission Act's discrimination against them was based on the fact that they were not US citizens. Once they became US citizens, the veterans thought, they would now be eligible for the same benefits enjoyed by their American counterparts. Unfortunately, the law retained the discriminatory provisions of the Rescission Act. US citizenship did not solve the problem.
Finally, 61 years after passage of the Rescission Act, the surviving Filipino war veterans may see its end.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Pulling the Ladder Up
Conceived and born of a marriage of convenience between liberal and conservative parents from the White House and the Senate, the immigration test tube baby known as “The Grand Bargain” died on June 28, 2007 of severe complications from a procedural vote. Two-thirds of the Senate Republicans ganged up to claim credit for the death blow, explaining their vote with the simple talk radio mantra that was effectively used to kill it – death to amnesty!
Perhaps its defeat was a failure of marketing. If it had been labeled "Registration of Illegal Aliens Act," it might have exploited the rationale provided by President George W. Bush–that the national security interests of the US required the federal government to be aware of the identities and whereabouts of at least 12 million people living and working in the US.
The two Republican senators who led the assault on the bill, Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina), hailed the bill’s defeat as a “victory for the American people.” That was a victory, the New York Times editorial opined, “if you favor semi-porous borders, rotting crops, and millions of people growing old overseas as they wait to enter legally. If you want federal officials to keep thimble-dipping the immigrant ocean with raids and detentions that shatter families and cripple businesses, and state and local government to go on erecting a ramshackle grid of disjointed immigration policies, then this debacle was for you.”
For the Filipino community, this was an enormous defeat. The bill contained the Akaka Amendment, sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) that would have provided at least 35,000 immediate relative visas to the married and unmarried offspring of Filipino WWII veterans with approved immigrant visas. If the bill had been approved, they would have had a chance to join their veteran fathers in the US while they’re still alive. With their octogenarian fathers dying at an exponential rate and their petitions being extinguished with their fathers' deaths, the chances are slim for most of them to immigrate to the US.
Along with this number are approximately 400,000 other Filipino relatives in the Philippines with approved immigrant visas “growing old overseas” while waiting decades for their priority dates to be current so that they can immigrate to the US. The bill contained a provision that would have added additional immigrant visas to clear the backlog within four (4) years.
The bill’s defeat is especially painful to the estimated 600,000 Filipinos in the US who are “overstaying tourists,” what Filipinos humorously refer to as TNTs, folks who are tago ng tago (hiding and hiding) and takot na takot (very fearful of being caught). There’s nothing at all humorous about their marginalized existence, working for minimum or even below-minimum “under the table” wages, unable to obtain drivers licenses, always worried that each morning might be their last free moment in the sun if they are apprehended by federal immigration agents.
The immigration reform bill would have provided them with probationary Z visas and a path to eventual legalization after a decade of good moral conduct (no criminal acts), being regularly employed, paying taxes and learning to read and speak English.
Perhaps no one gloated more gleefully at the defeat of the immigration bill than right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin, who has made a career of bashing illegal aliens in her columns which regularly appear in over 200 newspapers in the US and in her regular TV appearances on The O'Reilly Factor and in Hannity & Combes.
The irony of course is that this right-wing pit bull was born as Michelle Maglalang to a Filipino physician father, Dr. Apollo Maglalang, and a Filipina schoolteacher mother, Rafaella. Her Filipino parents immigrated to the US in 969 as a result of the passage of an immigration reform bill in 1965, co-authored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), the same co-author of the current immigration reform bill opposed by Malkin.
Malkin and other right-wing ideologues like Pat Buchanan favor the old immigration law in existence from 1920 to 1965 that capped annual immigration at 150,000 a year and which provided immigrant visas to people who easily assimilated into the American fabric. The favored immigration policy of right-wingers was heavily slanted towards European immigration as the quota for each country was arbitrarily based on the percentage of immigrants who entered the US through Ellis Island in 1920. Thus, if Germans were 35% of the total percentage of the people who immigrated to the US in 1920, they would be allotted 35% of the total number of immigrant visas doled out each year.
Until 1965, the rest of the world, outside of Europe, would be limited to no more than 50 immigrant visas a year. This restriction even included the Philippines after the country became a US commonwealth in 1935. If Sen. Kennedy had not persevered in pushing for the liberalization of US immigration laws to allow for expanded family immigration and the inclusion of professionals from countries like the Philippines, Michelle’s parents would never have had the opportunity to immigrate to the US and Michelle would never have been born in the US.
In fact, tens of thousands of Filipino physicians in the US who have registered as Republicans (like Michelle’s father) would not have been able to immigrate to the US if it wasn’t for Sen. Kennedy, who is regularly bashed by these very same Fil-Am Republicans. What's that about our utang na loob (debt of gratitude)? Unfortunately, like Michelle, many of these Filipinos who’ve made it in America have chosen to pull up the ladder that brought them to success in America to prevent others from climbing up as they did. It was a ladder that others before them worked to set up for them.
Those Filipinos seeking to climb up the ladder to make it in America, as Michelle Maglalang and her parents have done, must organize themselves to have a voice in policy, to counter the relentless bashing of Michelle Malkin. While millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants have organized themselves into a political force, demonstrating in rallies throughout the US and presenting
a human face to their issues, the Filipino TNTs have stayed in the background, out of the radar, not wishing to speak out about their issues and their plight. In part this is cultural as it is an Asian belief that the nail that sticks out is the one that gets pounded.
But this cultural belief runs counter to the old American saw that the greasy wheel gets the grease. If you don't speak up and speak out, as the undocumented Mexicans have done, you won't get the attention you need for your issues. The 600,000 Filipino TNTs in the US (1 out of every 5 or 6 of us) have to organize themselves to make the issue of their legalization a top priority for the community, just as the passage of the equity bill for Filipino WW II veterans issue has been in the past few years.
They must ask that Filipinos, who came up the ladder laid for them by others, also to work to keep the ladder down for others to climb as well.
Perhaps its defeat was a failure of marketing. If it had been labeled "Registration of Illegal Aliens Act," it might have exploited the rationale provided by President George W. Bush–that the national security interests of the US required the federal government to be aware of the identities and whereabouts of at least 12 million people living and working in the US.
The two Republican senators who led the assault on the bill, Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina), hailed the bill’s defeat as a “victory for the American people.” That was a victory, the New York Times editorial opined, “if you favor semi-porous borders, rotting crops, and millions of people growing old overseas as they wait to enter legally. If you want federal officials to keep thimble-dipping the immigrant ocean with raids and detentions that shatter families and cripple businesses, and state and local government to go on erecting a ramshackle grid of disjointed immigration policies, then this debacle was for you.”
For the Filipino community, this was an enormous defeat. The bill contained the Akaka Amendment, sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) that would have provided at least 35,000 immediate relative visas to the married and unmarried offspring of Filipino WWII veterans with approved immigrant visas. If the bill had been approved, they would have had a chance to join their veteran fathers in the US while they’re still alive. With their octogenarian fathers dying at an exponential rate and their petitions being extinguished with their fathers' deaths, the chances are slim for most of them to immigrate to the US.
Along with this number are approximately 400,000 other Filipino relatives in the Philippines with approved immigrant visas “growing old overseas” while waiting decades for their priority dates to be current so that they can immigrate to the US. The bill contained a provision that would have added additional immigrant visas to clear the backlog within four (4) years.
The bill’s defeat is especially painful to the estimated 600,000 Filipinos in the US who are “overstaying tourists,” what Filipinos humorously refer to as TNTs, folks who are tago ng tago (hiding and hiding) and takot na takot (very fearful of being caught). There’s nothing at all humorous about their marginalized existence, working for minimum or even below-minimum “under the table” wages, unable to obtain drivers licenses, always worried that each morning might be their last free moment in the sun if they are apprehended by federal immigration agents.
The immigration reform bill would have provided them with probationary Z visas and a path to eventual legalization after a decade of good moral conduct (no criminal acts), being regularly employed, paying taxes and learning to read and speak English.
Perhaps no one gloated more gleefully at the defeat of the immigration bill than right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin, who has made a career of bashing illegal aliens in her columns which regularly appear in over 200 newspapers in the US and in her regular TV appearances on The O'Reilly Factor and in Hannity & Combes.
The irony of course is that this right-wing pit bull was born as Michelle Maglalang to a Filipino physician father, Dr. Apollo Maglalang, and a Filipina schoolteacher mother, Rafaella. Her Filipino parents immigrated to the US in 969 as a result of the passage of an immigration reform bill in 1965, co-authored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), the same co-author of the current immigration reform bill opposed by Malkin.
Malkin and other right-wing ideologues like Pat Buchanan favor the old immigration law in existence from 1920 to 1965 that capped annual immigration at 150,000 a year and which provided immigrant visas to people who easily assimilated into the American fabric. The favored immigration policy of right-wingers was heavily slanted towards European immigration as the quota for each country was arbitrarily based on the percentage of immigrants who entered the US through Ellis Island in 1920. Thus, if Germans were 35% of the total percentage of the people who immigrated to the US in 1920, they would be allotted 35% of the total number of immigrant visas doled out each year.
Until 1965, the rest of the world, outside of Europe, would be limited to no more than 50 immigrant visas a year. This restriction even included the Philippines after the country became a US commonwealth in 1935. If Sen. Kennedy had not persevered in pushing for the liberalization of US immigration laws to allow for expanded family immigration and the inclusion of professionals from countries like the Philippines, Michelle’s parents would never have had the opportunity to immigrate to the US and Michelle would never have been born in the US.
In fact, tens of thousands of Filipino physicians in the US who have registered as Republicans (like Michelle’s father) would not have been able to immigrate to the US if it wasn’t for Sen. Kennedy, who is regularly bashed by these very same Fil-Am Republicans. What's that about our utang na loob (debt of gratitude)? Unfortunately, like Michelle, many of these Filipinos who’ve made it in America have chosen to pull up the ladder that brought them to success in America to prevent others from climbing up as they did. It was a ladder that others before them worked to set up for them.
Those Filipinos seeking to climb up the ladder to make it in America, as Michelle Maglalang and her parents have done, must organize themselves to have a voice in policy, to counter the relentless bashing of Michelle Malkin. While millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants have organized themselves into a political force, demonstrating in rallies throughout the US and presenting
a human face to their issues, the Filipino TNTs have stayed in the background, out of the radar, not wishing to speak out about their issues and their plight. In part this is cultural as it is an Asian belief that the nail that sticks out is the one that gets pounded.
But this cultural belief runs counter to the old American saw that the greasy wheel gets the grease. If you don't speak up and speak out, as the undocumented Mexicans have done, you won't get the attention you need for your issues. The 600,000 Filipino TNTs in the US (1 out of every 5 or 6 of us) have to organize themselves to make the issue of their legalization a top priority for the community, just as the passage of the equity bill for Filipino WW II veterans issue has been in the past few years.
They must ask that Filipinos, who came up the ladder laid for them by others, also to work to keep the ladder down for others to climb as well.
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