American Global Power from Empire to Superpower

Content Knowledge

According to Empires in World History: Power and Politics of Difference, by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “Empires are large political units, expansionist or with a large memory of power over space, politics that maintain distinction, and hierarchy as they incorporate people.” They further explain that empires draw in, usually by force, “peoples whose difference is made explicit under its rule.” Underlying the concept of empire is the assumption that different people within the empire will be ruled differently.⁶ The U.S.A. started its empire building right away with territorial expansion, growing from the original thirteen states in 1776 to what Daniel Immerwahr calls “the logo map” of the forty-eight contiguous states.⁷ These lands were taken primarily from the Native American sovereign tribes, but also from the French, Spanish, and English empires and the independent republic of Mexico. This territorial expansion falls under settler colonialism, the act of eliminating the native population of a conquered land and replacing it with a settler population.⁸ The U.S.’s success with settler colonialism meant that these colonized lands of the U.S. were incorporated into the nation-state. According to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, nation-state is, “based on the idea of a single person in a single territory constituting itself as a unique political community,” which “proclaims the commonality of its people – even if the reality is more complicated.” Like empire, nation-states insist its people be ruled by institution, but it rules through homogenizing the population and trying to keep those it sees as different out.⁹

The U.S. began acquiring extractive colonies just three years after it finished expanding to the logo map of the contiguous United States. Extractive colonialism are forms of colonialism in which the colonizing country does not permanently move their population into the colony, but instead uses the land, natural resources, and/or indigenous labor of the colony for profits.¹⁰ In 1857, the U.S. began annexing what were called guano islands, tiny, usually uninhabited, islands in the Caribbean and Pacific covered in bird droppings. This guano was needed for fertilizer and seen as so necessary that the United States was prepared to go to war over them.¹¹

The U.S.’s empire expanded to include colonized people with the Spanish-American War. Cuba had lucrative sugar plantations that Spain had been exploiting through extractive colonization for centuries. In the 1860s Cuban nationalists started pushing for reform and then revolution. What became known as the Ten Years War (1868-78) failed, but developed several powerful leaders and paved the way for future revolution.¹²

Meanwhile, in the U.S., assistant secretary of the navy, and future present, Theodore Roosevelt mourned the closing of the frontier, which was a problem brought to his attention by the work of historian Frederick Jackson Turner.¹³ Several factors convinced Roosevelt, and later President McKinley and Congress, that the next frontier was Cuba. According to Barbarian Virtues, by Matthew Frye Jacobson, the United States was in an economic depression in the 1890s that many business and political leaders argued was due to surplus. These surpluses needed new markets that colonies could provide.¹⁴ Roosevelt had also been convinced the U.S. needed to prove it had a strong navy and control of the seas when he read Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. The American public had also been convinced that the U.S.  military needed to intervene in Cuba from the sensationalist journalism of William Randolph Hearst. While his newspaper articles did bring attention to Spain’s oppression of the Cuban people, it also focused on exaggerated stories of the danger Americans in Cuba faced and made William Randolph Hearst’s paper handsome profits. President McKinley was committed to finding a diplomatic solution. However, on February 15, 1898, a U.S. warship, the USS Maine, stationed off the coast of Havana, mysteriously blew up. This pushed Congress to declare war on Spain. Less than a month after U.S. troops arrived in Cuba, Spain surrendered. The Treaty of Paris was signed in December 1898 by the U.S. and Spain, not Cuba. Through it the U.S. gained Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and for $20 million, the Philippines.¹⁵ 

The Philippines, which is composed of more than 7000 islands and had approximately 7.6 million inhabitants, had been a colony of Spain for centuries when the U.S. bought it. It also had a strong independence movement. As part of the Spanish-American war, U.S. Admiral George Dewey sunk the Spanish fleet of ships in Manila Bay of the Philippines. This emboldened Filipino nationalists, who declared independence on June 12, 1898. The Spanish army refused to surrender to the Filipino nationalist army, only to the U.S. While they were working together to defeat Spain, nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo claimed that Dewey promised him Filipino independence, but later Dewey denied this. After the Treaty of Paris was signed, the U.S. refused to acknowledge the government that Filipino nationalists had set up. Therefore, the Philippine Republic declared war on the U.S. on February 4, 1899. This war lasted for several years, and the U.S. army committed many atrocities including killing civilians, putting civilians into concentration camps, and torturing prisoners of war. Aguinaldo was captured two years into the war. He reluctantly pledged allegiance to the United States, and urged Filipino nationalists to cooperate with the U.S., but the war continued.^{16 17}

Meanwhile, there was a large debate in the U.S. among politicians, business leaders, and in the newspapers over whether or not the U.S. should continue its colonizing efforts in the Philippines. On the side of imperialism many business interests, saw China as the most important market to solve their surplus problem. They wanted the Philippines to “serve as a ‘stepping stone’ to the China market.”¹⁸ Politicians and many newspapers asserted that the war proved Filipinos were uncivilized and not capable of self-government. They advocated for gradual release of governmental responsibility to the Filipino people. The side opposing imperialism was a strange coalition. Civil rights advocates thought the U.S. needed to be focusing on the problems at home and felt empathy for the Filipinos in their quest for independence against racial subjugation. Labor leaders feared people from the new colony would come to the mainland and take Americans jobs. Many of the anti-imperialists used racist rhetoric, not wanting to extend U.S. rights and protections to inferior peoples who would change the white Protestant Christian culture of America.¹⁹

The imperialists won out and the U.S. government began a process that, according to Kristin L. Hoganson, was “summed up by the term benevolent assimilation, which implied development along U.S. terms and integration into the U.S. economic system.”²⁰ The U.S. used local governments and public-private partnerships, including missionaries, to carry out these goals. They prioritized English-language public schools and public health. They distributed land to individuals through homestead legislation and improved roads and harbors. The U.S. government tied the Philippine economy to the U.S. economy, having most of Philippine exports going to the U.S. This “increased the power of the landed oligarchy.”²¹ The power of the landed elite was also strengthened by the voting laws the U.S. imposed. Voters had to be male, 23 or older, own property, and pass a literacy test. Future president William Taft was appointed head of the all-white American male commission of the Philippines in 1900. The Filipinos, under American rule, never had U.S. citizenship. A series of Supreme Court rulings in 1901 surrounding the rights of residents of the U.S.’s newly acquired territories have come to be known as the Insular Cases. These cases were decided at the same time as Plessy vs. Ferguson and were also centered around race, but they are much less known and are still considered good case law. These cases determined that the Constitution does not apply to unincorporated territories and therefore residents of the territories do not automatically have U.S. citizenship. Citizenship can only be granted to colonies through acts of Congress. Yet, residents of the colonies were legally U.S. nationals, and could serve in the U.S. military, which Filipino men did in great numbers.²²

In 1916, The Philippine Autonomy Act passed, replacing the commission with a Senate and House of Representatives elected by the Filipino voters and a governor appointed by the president. The Jones Act of 1916 announced the U.S.’s intentions of gradual release of power to Filipinos with the goal of withdrawing from the Philippines once the United States saw a stable government in place. Withdrawal kept being delayed until the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, which set July 4, 1946 as Independence Day.²³ The Japanese military invaded the Philippines on December 7, 1941 and occupied it until 1945. Many Filipinos fought in the Philippines forces against the Japanese. In 1945, the U.S. retook the Philippines from Japan, destroying the capital city of Manila in the process.²⁴ The Philippines did still gain Independence from the U.S. on July 4, 1946. However, in April 1946, Congress passed the Bell Trade Act, which set strict quotas on Philippine imports to the U.S. but required complete access to the Philippines for American exports and commercial interests. This lopsided act ensured continued unequal economic relations between colonizer and colonized long after independence. ²⁵

What is the connection between empires and immigration? On the demand side, capitalism demanded growing markets for American products. One way to ensure people in other lands bought U.S. products was to colonize them. Also. U.S. merchants and missionaries were all over the world, and were requesting ever more protection from the U.S. military and government.²⁶ On the flip side, America’s growing industry required an endless supply of cheap labor. With the industrial revolution, the jobs in the mainland U.S. went from over half farming in 1870, to over two thirds factory work in the 1910s. Since this time period, the immigrant has been seen as the job seeker in the mainland public’s eyes, willing to do unskilled labor for less than we are willing.²⁷

The demand side rests on the imbalance of economic and political power that colonization causes. Countries created empires for economic and political gains. They excused their behavior by spreading the racist idea that colonization helps the colonized because the colonizers were superior to the colonized. Yet, empires caused great economic inequalities between the colonizers and the colonized. For example, by 1913, the per capital income in the European imperial powers was more than three times greater than their overseas colonies.²⁸ These inequalities usually persisted even if colonies gained independence. The inequalities prompted (we could even say sometimes necessitated) immigration from colonized countries to colonizer countries. For example, a laborer in the U.S. earned on average $10.68 a week in 1910. Yet, in most of the countries immigrants were arriving from, laborers earned less than $2 a week.²⁹

However, the same racist ideas that allowed colonizer countries to build their empires, kept their voters from wanting immigrants from the empires be allowed to be citizens of their countries. As noted earlier, increases in U.S. mainlanders around the world led to an increase in U.S. global intervention. The racist ideas of uncivilized and barbaric people needing to learn western religion, government, and work ethic that was used to justified the U.S.’s global empire led to xenophobia among the American public. This led to calls for isolationism in U.S. foreign policy. The isolationists never won out when it came to colonization, but they often won out when it came to immigration restriction in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, especially when it came to restricting immigrants from Asia and Latin America. In fact, according to Matthew Frye Jacobson, many “Americans reversed the power dynamics of imperialism, so that it was they, the powerful natives of an emerging world power, who were under attack.” ³⁰ What attack? Immigrants would destroy America’s culture by refusing to assimilate, drive down wages, become public charges, and commit crimes. The ongoing call for immigration restriction and to crack down on “illegal immigration” led to the development of a huge bureaucracy around immigration and what is now call remote control of immigration. In 1924, Congress moved the daily work of immigration inspection and of handing out limited numbers of visas from the border to American consuls in foreign countries. Remote control keeps immigration is the hand of the State Department and in some ways, out of sight and out of mind for most of the American public.³¹

When people talk about foreign relations, they often think about foreign trade or international relations. They are not usually referring to the U.S.’s colonies or immigration. Never the less, immigration has connected the U.S. to the rest of the world through all of U.S. history, even during periods seen as isolationist. What many non-immigrant mainland Americans do not see is that most immigrants remain connected to the people and places they left behind. In fact, family unification, often also called more negatively “chain migration”, accounts for much, in some times in U.S. history even the majority, of immigration. This is when a person is immigrating to be with a family member who is already living in the U.S.³² Interconnected communities of families and friends develop in cities in mainland U.S. that are still very much attached to their home countries. For centuries, immigrants have not only been sending for their relatives to come join them in the U.S., but also sending money home to help their families and communities. This money is called remittances and has played a transformative role in many countries of origins’ economies.³³

Immigration from the Philippines to the U.S. was almost non-existent until U.S. colonization. With colonization, Filipinos became U.S. nationals. Among the few rights and protections that status gave Filipinos was that they were no longer subject to the very strict immigration quotas that the U.S. government had placed on other Asian countries. Many American lawmakers were very worried about unrestricted Filipino migration but could do nothing about this international convention.³⁴

The first large group of Filipinos migrating to mainland came in the first decade of the 1900s. There were three groups from three different tiers of Filipinos society. At the top were college students studying under the Pensionado Act of 1903. This program sponsored students to study in the U.S. and then become leaders in the colonial government in the Philippines as part of the Civil Governor William Howard Taft’s “Americanization” policy. The second group were Filipino veterans who had served in the U.S. Navy. This followed a 1901 Executive Order issued by President McKinley authorizing Filipino admission into the Navy. The third group were laborers recruited by Hawaiian sugar plantation owners to harvest sugar cane starting in 1906. Filipino laborers were used to replace low-wage Japanese workers in the sugar cane plantations because Japanese workers had started to organize for better working conditions. In the 1920’s, Filipino and Japanese labors joined together to strike for better working conditions on the Hawaiian plantations, but were ultimately unsuccessful.³⁵

At this same time, thousands of U.S. citizens came to the Philippines as part of the colonial administration. The influx of American people, consumer products, and culture disrupted Philippine traditions of reciprocity, replacing them with individualism, materialism and upward mobility. The colonial government also restructured the economy to focus on cash crops for export. This left many subsistence farmers landless and jobless, necessitating migration.³⁶

As the salmon canning industry developed in Alaska in the 1920s, Filipino laborers were recruited to immigrate there. The growing agribusiness in the mainland also needed low-wage laborers, but faced criticism from nativists for recruiting from Mexico and Asia and difficulties because of immigration quotas. Therefore, they began recruiting Filipino young men as farm labors on the West Coast. Growers sought out workers from racially and politically disenfranchised groups because they would work for low wages and were less likely to complain, strike, or quit over poor working and living conditions. More than half of the migrants came from the plantations in Hawaii. By the mid-1920s, migration networks between the Philippines and the U.S. were firmly in place and remittances were flowing back to many families in the Philippines. By 1930, there were approximately 4,500 Filipinos living in the U.S. mainland. Most were male, and almost all lived on the West Coast. Nativist leaders, especially in California, were frustrated with the free migration of Filipinos and called them the “third Asiatic invasion”.³⁷ They launched propaganda campaigns warning about the dangers of Filipino settlement in California, which led to widespread discrimination culminating in a series of race riots and physical attacks against Filipinos. Nativists were trying to get the federal government to restrict immigration from the Philippines. When they could not, they joined the coalition pushing for Philippine independence. ³⁸

Immigration all but stopped during the Great Depression. During WWII, most Filipino American men were too old for the draft, but many did enlist to liberate the Philippines from Japan. Filipino American men were also able to move from the fields to the factory, as wartime demand for workers trumped racial exclusion. They were also still in high demand in the fields and could begin to negotiate for better wages and working conditions. Filipino GIs were eligible for citizenship but still faced racism, segregation, and antimiscegenation laws. Once the U.S. recaptured the Philippines in 1941, the U.S. Army established a military command post on the Philippines. An estimated 200,000 – 250,000 Filipino troops served under U.S. command. The U.S. government had promised these soldiers the same veteran’s benefits as U.S. soldiers and they were technically entitled to U.S. citizenship. However, after the end of the war, Congress declared that those obligations ended with Philippine sovereignty. Filipino servicemen were only allowed to apply for citizenship before the 1946 handover. This was poorly advertised and many applicants were denied for no reason. Only 11,000 veterans were granted citizenship and most of those were nationals already living in the U.S. ³⁹

In 1946, the Philippines became an independent nation, and with this came strict immigration quotas. Therefore, there was little immigration to the U.S. until immigration laws changed in the 1960s. One exception to the quotas were war brides. Approximately 1,600 Filipino women came to the U.S. as war brides following WWII.⁴⁰

The removal of national origin quotas from U.S. Immigration Act in 1965 and Filipino policies that encouraged labor emigration contributed to high levels of migration from the Philippines to the U.S. From 1960 to 1980, the Filipino immigrant population in the U.S. increased from 105,000 to 501,000 people.⁴¹ Dictator Ferdinand Marcos also came to power in 1965 and ruled the Philippines until 1986. Marcos put the country under martial law. His government was corrupt and led to poverty and a debt crisis. Many young Filipinos felt they had no other choice but to emigrate.⁴² One of the largest populations to leave were Filipino women graduating from nursing school. The legacy of colonization paved the way for this. During the colonial period, Philippine schools were basically satellites for mainland universities. After independence, Philippine nursing schools continued to teach U.S.-centric nursing practices, making it easy for Filipino nurses to work in U.S. hospitals.⁴³ The 1965 Immigration Act gave preferences to immigrants with needed skills. Nursing shortages started in the 1960s in the U.S., as women began entering professions previously not open to them. It continues to today, as the U.S. population continues to age, needing more healthcare. Filipino nurses were recruited to work all over the country, but most ended up settling in California where there were already established Filipino communities. In 2018, 28% of all immigrants working as registered nurses in the U.S. were Filipino.⁴⁴ Filipino nurses are often recruited to work in hard to fill critical care units. In 2021, Filipinos were four percent of the total nurses in the U.S., but 31% of all nurse deaths due to COVID 19.⁴⁵

Today, most people immigrating to the U.S. from the Philippines do so through family reunification, either as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens or through family-sponsorship. Many also obtain green cards through employment. Filipinos have much higher college education rates than both the foreign-born and U.S.-born populations in the United States. Between 2014 and 2018, the largest populations of immigrants from the Philippines were in California (43%). The next most populous states were Hawaii and then Texas, Illinois, New York and Nevada. The NY-NJ-PA metro area had a Filipino immigrant population of 151,000, which was 0.8% of the population. A very small number of Filipino immigrants are unauthorized (approximately 313,000 in the 2012-16 period), three percent of the total population of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Most of these Filipino immigrants (approximately 26,000) were eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, but as of March 2022, only 3,270 Filipinos were participating.⁴⁶

Even though Emma Lazarus’s poem on the statue of liberty proclaims the U.S. to be a benevolent, empathetic country that welcomes the lowest of immigrants, America’s history of immigration rhetoric and immigration policy shows that was never true. Every wave of immigration was always seen as a threat to our American way of life. Yet, according to Matthew Frye Jacobson, “the capacity of the republic to withstand its own diversity is greater than the capacity of many citizens to imagine an America that departs significantly from the demographic status quo.”⁴⁷ In fact, immigrants have never exceeded more than fifteen percent of the U.S.’s total population.⁴⁸ Immigrants’ narratives show more similarities among groups and over time than they show differences. One important similarity, according to Foreign Relations American Immigration in Global Perspective, is the “human tendency to love and remain attached to family and birthplace.”⁴⁹

It is also difficult for Americans to see the connection between empires and immigration because the U.S.’s former and current colonies are invisible to most of the American public. The United States empire, especially the period of empire building that resulted in the Philippines being a U.S. territory, goes against our exceptionalism view of America being a benevolent and reluctant worldwide power, just as our immigration policies do.⁵⁰