A Filipino Commissioner Fires Back at the Johnson Bill
Seattle's Filipino community, facing a federal bill to exclude them from the mainland, hears Commissioner Pedro Guevara argue that America owes the Philippines independence before it owes it exclusion.
In a statement to the press, Resident Commissioner Pedro Guevara read the following on the recent Johnson bill:
"The Filipinos have been placed under the American flag and sovereignty against their will and up to the present time, they are struggling to be independent from the United States. If Representative Johnson believes that the Filipinos are a competition to American labor, he should then summon all his efforts to persuade the United States Government to grant them their independence, as solemnly promised by the Congress of the United States. This is said with utmost frankness and sincerity, and without ill-feeling whatsoever. If such promise is fulfilled the Filipinos will have nothing to say to the bill introduced by Representative Johnson. But as long as the Filipinos are kept under the American flag and protection, even a mere suggestion of discriminatory legislation against the Filipinos would find no justification."
“If Representative Johnson believes that the Filipinos are a competition to American labor, he should then summon all his efforts to persuade the United States Government to grant them their independence, as solemnly promised by the Congress of the United States.”
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 had already shut out Asian immigration, and the 1929-30 push to extend exclusion to Filipinos — then US nationals — was the next step. Seattle's Filipino Forum, founded the same year, made this fight its front page. The argument Guevara makes — that a colonial power cannot both claim a people and then bar them — is the same one that echoes in today's debates over citizenship, labor migration and who gets to belong.
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