Health Care & Filipino Migration
Filipinos have migrated to the U.S. in multiple waves. My parents were part of the Fourth Wave of immigration. This wave was made possible by the passage of the Hart-Celler Act and the 1976 Health Professional Assistance Act, which was created to solve shortages of healthcare providers in the U.S.
Filipino doctors and nurses were primed to fill the healthcare shortages. When the U.S. purchased the Philippines as a territory, they took over the education system. English was the lingua franca of Philippine schools (replacing Spanish) from the early 20th century.
“They needed doctors. There was a need.” - my mom
“The mission of the United States is benevolent assimilation. ”
BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION.
How did the U.S. wish to assimilate a people that they considered little brown brothers?
William H. Taft, the first American Governor-General of the Philippines told President McKinley that "our little brown brothers" would need "fifty or one hundred years" of close supervision "to develop anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles and skills."
Catherine Ceniza Choy explores how the U.S. remade the educational system in the Philippines (particularly medical education) in her study, Empire of Care. In her book, she quotes less-than-benevolent attitudes toward Filipinos:
“We are practically cleaning up these Islands, left foul and insanitary and diseased by generations of hygienically ignorant peoples. We are stamping out the conflagration of disease started long before the American occupation…” – Victor Heiser, director of health in the Philippine islands
If Filipinos were going to now be U.S. nationals, Filipino bodies had to be remade into acceptable American notions of strong and healthy. They created an Americanized training hospital system in the Philippines that followed U.S. professional nursing trends.
I am not opposed to using the resources of wealthier countries to help people living in under-resourced countries.
I am opposed to the racialized reason behind it.
I am for the U.S. government investing in the health of their citizens.
I am for investment in education.
In 1976, Congress passes the Health Professions Educational Act.
The bill starts with the text: “The Congress finds and declares that the availability of high quality health care to all Americans is a national goal.”
Less than 50 years later….
As I write this, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history (43 days) has recently ended. Democrats attempted to hold out on a key issue: extending health care subsidies, without which tens of millions of Americans would see their health care costs increased. Maybe even doubled.
Healthcare is a human right. Educating the populace should be the goal of a democracy. What could our country be if our government invested in the good living of its people again?
“Our country has many truths, but certainly one of them has to be that this was never a democracy. That this was a hope of democracy, an enormous, an enormous hope for true democracy, and that it failed many people from the outset and it’s failing more people now.”