The White House Says the Chinese Exclusion Act Wasn't About Race. Filipino History Says Otherwise.
The White House Says the Chinese Exclusion Act Wasn't About Race. Filipino History Says Otherwise.
A new federal report recasts the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act as a security measure, not racism. But the same machinery came for Filipinos a generation later — and forgetting the first erasure is how they clear the way to erase ours.
On the Fourth of July, the White House's Domestic Policy Council released a 162-page report titled Saving America's Story, accusing the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History of trading history for what it calls "extreme political activism." Buried in its complaints is a paragraph that most of the country will scroll past, but that no Filipino-American family should. The report objects to the museum describing restrictive immigration as a tool of white supremacy — and the example it singles out to dispute is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In the report's telling, that law was not about race. It was, supposedly, about national security.
I want to be careful and exact here, because accuracy is the whole point of this piece. This is not an argument about whether a museum uses jargon some visitors find off-putting — a fair criticism the report sometimes lands. This is an argument about whether the most explicitly racial immigration law in American history can be reclassified, by memo, as something else. And it matters to us — to Filipinos — for a reason the headlines are missing: the machine that excluded the Chinese did not stop with the Chinese. A generation later, that same machine came for us. If you can erase the racism from the first chapter, you can erase it from ours.
California was the epicenter of anti-Filipino violence. In January 1930, white mobs numbering in the hundreds attacked Filipino farmworkers across Watsonville, dragging men from labor camps and firing into their bunkhouses. On January 23, a 22-year-old farmworker named Fermin Tobera was shot through the heart as he sheltered indoors. His death made headlines from Manila to New York. In 2011, the State of California formally apologized to Filipino-Americans for the anti-miscegenation laws and civil-rights violations of that era.
Alaala ah-lah-AH-lah
Meaning: Memory; remembrance; that which is kept and carried so it is not lost.
"Ang alaala ang hindi kayang burahin ng anumang ulat."
("Memory is the one thing no report can erase.")
A placard can be rewritten. A museum wall can be repainted. But alaala — the memory a family carries and passes down — is the archive no administration can edit. That is why this article exists, and why we write our history down.
I came to this country in 1976, at the age of nine, from SSS Village in Marikina. By then I had already read Rizal and Bonifacio — the Katipunan was in my head before I ever saw an American classroom. What I did not yet understand, as a boy in Chicago and then in Vallejo, was how recently the door I walked through had been bolted shut to people who looked exactly like my father. My three children were born here, American citizens by birth. They will never be reclassified as aliens overnight. They should know that this was not always guaranteed — and that it was not guaranteed by accident.
— J.F.R. Perseveranda, Vallejo, California
What the Report Actually Says
Let's start with the primary source, not the outrage. Saving America's Story was published by the White House Domestic Policy Council on July 4, 2026. Its central charge is that the National Museum of American History has abandoned "straightforward historical education" for ideology, and it lists what it considers evidence: "anti-white activism," "illegal alien activism," and "transgender activism," among others. The Smithsonian's Secretary, Lonnie Bunch, publicly disputed the report as an unfair characterization; the Organization of American Historians — the largest professional body of U.S. historians — rejected it outright as executive overreach into an independent institution.
Within that broader fight sits the specific claim this article is about. The report criticizes the museum for framing restrictive immigration as "a tool of white supremacy," and it names the Chinese Exclusion Act as the case it rejects — recasting the 1882 law as a question of national security rather than racial exclusion. It was Stop AAPI Hate that first flagged this passage for the AAPI community, and they are right to sound the alarm. Because here is the problem: the historical record on the Chinese Exclusion Act is not ambiguous. It is one of the most thoroughly documented racial laws the United States ever passed.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major federal law to suspend immigration for an entire nationality and to bar its members from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. It was preceded by the Page Act of 1875, which targeted Chinese women. It was expanded, made permanent, and not repealed until the Magnuson Act of 1943 — meaning it governed American law for more than six decades. Its debates in Congress were conducted in openly racial language. The "national security" framing is not how the law was written, argued, or enforced.
Then the Same Machine Came for Us
Here is the part of the story that belongs to Filipinos, and that the report's framing quietly threatens. The exclusion of the Chinese was not a one-time event. It was the opening move in a decades-long project to decide which Asians could belong in America — and Filipinos were written into that same project, by the same logic, within living memory of many families reading this.
Because the Philippines was a U.S. colony after 1898, Filipinos occupied a strange legal category: they were U.S. nationals, not citizens, and could travel relatively freely to the mainland. By 1930, roughly 45,000 Filipinos lived in the continental United States, most of them young men working the fields, canneries, and service jobs of the West Coast. And as their numbers grew, the same nativist machinery that had been aimed at the Chinese and Japanese turned toward them.
Over five days, white mobs attacked Filipino farmworkers throughout the Pajaro Valley. On January 23, 22-year-old Fermin Tobera was shot dead in a labor-camp bunkhouse. The violence was driven openly by fears of job competition and of Filipino men socializing with white women.
A California appeals court ruled that Filipinos, as "Malays," did not fall under the state's ban on white "Mongolian" marriages — briefly allowing Filipino-white couples to marry. The victory lasted barely a week. That August, Governor James Rolph signed bills adding the "Malay race" to the anti-miscegenation law and retroactively voiding such marriages.
Sold as a path to Philippine independence, the law reclassified every Filipino in the United States from national to alien — overnight, with no grandfathering — and capped immigration from the Philippines at 50 people per year. Filipinos already here still could not naturalize and were cut off from New Deal relief programs. Historian Teodoro Agoncillo called it "the Filipino Exclusion Act of 1934."
The federal government offered Filipinos one-way passage back to the Philippines — on the condition that they forfeit the right to ever return. Roughly 2,200 people accepted. The rest stayed, in a country that had just declared them foreigners.
Read that timeline again and notice what it is not: it is not a national-security policy. Nobody firing into a Watsonville bunkhouse was protecting the homeland. Nobody adding "Malay" to a marriage law was guarding a border. The 50-person quota — below the minimum of 100 that every other country received — was, in the words of one contemporary account, a gesture designed to place Filipinos "just barely above the fully excludable Asiatic races." The purpose was never security. The purpose was to decide who counted as white enough to belong, and to legislate the rest to the margins.
Why "National Security" Is the Oldest Trick
This is the through-line, and it is why the report's reframing should trouble anyone who values an honest record. "National security" is the phrase power reaches for when it wants a racial policy to sound reasonable to later generations. It was applied to the Chinese in 1882. It was applied to the Japanese Americans interned in 1942. And the same anxieties — foreign men, unfair competition, contamination of the "American" family — were applied to Filipinos in the 1930s without anyone bothering to dress them up at all.
When a federal report tells you the Chinese Exclusion Act was really about security, it is not merely making one debatable historical claim. It is laundering the entire logic — the logic that also produced Tydings-McDuffie, the repatriation ships, and the amended marriage laws — into something respectable. And a logic that has been made respectable can always be used again.
What Erasure Costs — and Who Pays
There is a hopeful half to this story, and our children deserve to know it too. The exclusion architecture did not last. The Magnuson Act repealed Chinese exclusion in 1943. The Luce-Celler Act of 1946 finally restored the right of Filipinos to naturalize as American citizens. And the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 dismantled the racial quota system entirely — which is the reason so many of us, my own family included, were able to come at all. My children are citizens today because a country that once slammed the door eventually, painfully, chose to open it.
But those doors did not open on their own, and they do not stay open on their own. They opened because people insisted on remembering — because Filipino farmworkers organized, because families told the truth at their kitchen tables, because historians and museums did the unglamorous work of writing it all down accurately. That is exactly the work Saving America's Story now targets. This is why we stand with Stop AAPI Hate on this one, plainly and without hedging: the honest history of Asian exclusion is not "anti-American activism." It is the record that lets a democracy see clearly enough not to repeat itself.
The Filipino stake here is not abstract. When the story of Chinese exclusion is softened into a security footnote, the story of Filipino exclusion — Watsonville, the 50-person quota, the repatriation ships — becomes even easier to leave out entirely. Our chapter was always the one most likely to be forgotten. Protecting the Chinese chapter is how we protect our own.
A Letter to My Children
Veronica, Chesca, JianCarlo — and to whoever reads this after you, in a year I won't see:
You were born American. No memo, no report, no administration can reclassify you into a foreigner overnight, the way one law did to Filipinos in 1934 with a single signature. I need you to understand that this security you were born into is not the natural order of things. It is an inheritance — bought by people whose names you will never learn, farmworkers shot in California bunkhouses, couples who fought a county clerk just to marry, a whole generation declared alien in the only country they had ever worked for.
The temptation, always, will be to let the hard parts of the story blur — to accept a cleaner version where nobody was cruel and nothing was racial and it was all just prudent policy. That version is more comfortable. It is also a lie, and lies about the past are never idle; they are tools, kept sharp for the next time someone wants to decide who belongs. Your job is not to be bitter about this history. Your job is to be accurate about it. Remember it precisely, tell it plainly, and hand it down intact. That is what alaala means. That is the whole reason I built this archive: so that when someone tries to tell you the door was never locked, you will already know better — because your father wrote it down.
The Filipino is worth remembering accurately. So are the Chinese farmhands of 1882, and everyone who was told they did not count. Keep the record. Keep it honest. That is how we make sure it does not happen again.
- The White House Domestic Policy Council — Saving America's Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage (July 4, 2026)
- ABC News; NPR; The Washington Post; CNN — coverage of the report and the Smithsonian's response (July 2026)
- Organization of American Historians — Statement on "Saving America's Story" (July 6, 2026)
- Stop AAPI Hate — public statement on the report's Chinese Exclusion Act framing
- Immigration History (immigrationhistory.org) — Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, primary text and analysis
- EBSCO Research Starters — Filipino Repatriation Act of 1935; Roldan v. Los Angeles County
- Wikipedia; CourtListener — Roldan v. Los Angeles County, 129 Cal. App. 267 (1933)
- Equal Justice Initiative; UC Santa Cruz "Watsonville is in the Heart" — Watsonville riots and the death of Fermin Tobera (January 1930)
- U.S. National Archives / Library of Congress — Chinese Exclusion Act (1882); Magnuson Act (1943); Luce-Celler Act (1946); Immigration and Nationality Act (1965)
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J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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