In a 1955 column in the now-defunct Manila Chronicle, the columnist I.P. Soliongco wrote rather scathingly about how Filipinos regard America. There are Filipinos, he said, “who dream of America even in their waking hours and who see in America their only salvation on earth, if not in heaven.”
Soliongco’s salty dismissiveness was made at a time of nascent post-war nationalist movement in the Philippines and directed at Filipinos who believed Uncle Sam would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. The decades that followed, marked by America’s “benevolence,” pretty much affirmed that view. In their eyes, America embodied an ideal that Filipinos ought to aspire to: the great American Dream was also the great Filipino Dream. Then came Donald J. Trump and all the disruptions that followed in his wake that, many think, now threaten to upend that dream.
But will it, really? Will Trump 2.0 be disruptive enough for Filipinos to take a long hard look at America and, necessarily, at themselves and the values that they formed in their adoptive country? Is the second coming of Trump going to be a reckoning for them? Or will they double down on the notion that US imperfections and transgressions do not matter because America, as Filipino-American writer Carlos Bulosan put it, is in the heart?
Status Quo
The key to understanding our love affair with America lies in one particular reality: It’s a relationship that blossomed out of Filipinos’ desire for a better life that they thought they could only achieve elsewhere. Unlike many other migrant groups, Filipinos flocked to the U.S. not due to wars or upheavals, but to escape the poverty-driven unease that dominated Philippine life for far too long.
As my New York-based friend, the Filipino-American journalist Marivir Montebon, told me: “Most Filipinos regard America as their great employer. They work hard like carabaos.” Not many of them, she said, care about politics and public life.
Regardless of Trump’s rhetoric against immigration and a promise to mass deport illegal migrants, most Filipino-Americans don’t seem to care because they don’t see themselves as vulnerable.
The same motivations driven by the same realities are still prevalent. The status quo remains and Filipinos, in general, love that. This is why it is unrealistic, my friend told me, to expect Filipinos to change their views of Trump and the U.S. Trump, in fact, does not matter; what matters is that the status quo still works.
At the heart of this, of course, is class.
Most of the more than 10 million Filipinos abroad come from the working class. A 2023 Philippine government survey indicates that almost half of Filipino workers in the U.S. toil in what is called “elementary occupations,” jobs that mostly require manual labor. The statistics and what they represent — i.e. the constant search for work and better opportunities — don’t differ dramatically from the situation in the Philippines, where poverty remains prevalent.
Betting on Winning Dogs
So, what do all these have to do with Trump? Filipinos in the Philippines or elsewhere tend to go for the “sure winner.” This explains the rise of such tyrants as Rodrigo Duterte and, well, Trump. But more than that, they don’t particularly like disruptions and are, thus, not likely to change what works for them. This could be why, regardless of Trump’s rhetoric against immigration and a promise to mass deport illegal migrants, most Filipino-Americans don’t seem to care because they don’t see themselves as vulnerable. They take comfort in the fact that Filipinos are not on top of the list of illegal migrants.
Filipinos in the U.S. can be quite racist, too, and some resent the tendency among Democrats to provide “too much safety net,” as one Filipino-American told me, to other immigrant groups. That resentment springs from their belief that other immigrants should work just as hard as they do — they who have toiled long and hard to be where they are. This thinking feeds into the whole “model minority” phenomenon, in which Filipinos and others see themselves as the “better immigrants” compared to non-Asians.
That also ties in with the conservatism, perhaps influenced by Catholicism, that is quite prevalent among Filipinos in America and abroad, even among those registered as Democrats, as my friend Marivir, who migrated to the U.S. in 2007, told me.
“It is really the culture of conservatism that seeps into this individual consciousness of loving the powerful, obeying the powerful, that cuts across rich and poor Filipino-Americans,” she said. She calls it the “psyche of religiosity and submission” and these have worked against Filipino Americans to the point that they “are not a political force to reckon with.”
But the bottom line seems to be that Filipinos here and in America see in Trump 2.0 as the perpetuation of the status quo. Perhaps more crucially, they see him as an affirmation of their long-held conviction that, as long as they work hard, keep their head down, and don’t question authority, they will be fine. This is unlikely to change soon but, for now, that’s probably the only reason why America will always have a place in their hearts.