Conference Agenda

In 1956, the Committee on Education and Labor in the US House of Representatives held a series of hearings to decide if the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a signal act of New Deal labor laws, should be enforced in U.S. territories and possessions, including U.S. military bases that proliferated across Pacific islands. The hearing made clear the extent to which the enormous presence of the U.S. military around the world in the 1950s depended on the U.S. military and military contractor’s ability to hire Filipino civilians at wages far lower than the military’s wage rate for U.S. citizens. In fact, beginning in 1947, the U.S. military had actively recruited and employed thousands of Filipino workers on Guam Wake Island, Okinawa, and Saipan. By 1956, Filipino workers had lodged complaints regarding “discriminatory wage rates” and thus the U.S. congress brought representatives from the U.S. Departments of Defense, Labor, and State Department to explain why U.S. Military and U.S. military contractors should remain exempt from the minimum wage standards set by the FLSA. Focusing on how experts in the U.S. State and Labor Department worked alongside the U.S. military to defend and expand the use of low-wage foreign laborers, this paper will show how the U.S. and Philippine government enabled the mobility of Filipino workers while, at the same time, insisted on the immobility of U.S. labor laws. Ultimately this paper will argue that even as capital and state interest sought ways to legally and efficiently move workers across national borders without having to navigate the bureaucratic rules governing immigration laws, they simultaneously relied on the legal limits international borders could provide in order to limit the enforcement of national labor laws

In 1906, the Hawai’ian Sugar Planters Association signed an agreement with American colonial officials in the Philippines to lay the legal groundwork to recruit Filipino young men for work on Hawai’i. By 1916, more than twenty thousand had signed three-year contracts. That year, they constituted over 20 percent of the U.S. territory’s plantation workforce and sent over 3 million dollars back home in remittances. Four years earlier the Philippine state had initiated an “internal migration” program that expanded significantly in the next two decades. Directed by the Philippine Bureau of Labor, the migration program sought to settle families onto small-hold farms on legally designated “public land” and targeted workers in the “densely populated,” majority-Catholic provinces who would be willing to move to areas whose indigenous populations were Muslim or “non-Christian.” Often transnational and domestic migration programs are treated as different state projects. The first, we observe, push colonial subjects into foreign places where they are vulnerable to extreme exploitation because of their legal designation as non-citizens. When we consider “internal” migration like the kind I describe above, we emphasize how it functions as a form of settler colonization, designed to confiscate indigenous land and remake territories into spaces that are useful to the elite-governed national or colonial political economies. This essay argues that we should consider how both state-authorized out-migration and what Philippine authorities called “inter-island migration” were elements of an imperial political economy that, in many ways, continues to this day despite Philippine independence. These programs rested on different legal principles and different ideas about citizenship, gender, and the home. Yet, considering how they emerged alongside and in dialogue with each other can offer new insights into how laboring migrants and wealth they generated came to sit at the heart of mythologies about the ostensible health of as nation.