Filipinos comprise the second largest group of Asia-born immigrants in the United States, yet looking at available census data it’s difficult to understand how this came to be. The U.S. Census Bureau’s data provides only a very limited amount of information about Filipino immigration post-1980. Because of the limited data pre-1980, we can’t properly gauge how the rate and distribution have changed.

Looking at the historical background, in late 1906, five years after the Philippine-American war officially ended, Filipinos began to migrate to the U.S. in search of work via Hawaii. Over the next three decades, a significant number of Filipinos followed their example. Migration Information Source estimated that around 150,000 Filipinos arrived in the U.S. between 1907 and 1930, most of whom stayed in Hawaii to work on the plantations. The ones that chose not to stay looked for agricultural work in states like California, Oregon, and Washington. A major change occurred, however, when the Philippines Independence Act of 1934 was passed in the United States, as it would grant the Philippines independence ten years later. In order to prevent a flood of Filipino migrants to the U.S. resulting from the act, it also it restricted the number of allowed visas from the Philippines to fifty per year, in turn greatly reducing the number of migrants.

In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act did away with nationality-based restrictions, which allowed migration from the Philippines to once again greatly increase. The incentive to migrate came from an increase in job demand in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in medical professions. The U.S. General Accounting Office via HealthAffairs reports that in 1980, 75% of foreign nationals taking the nursing licensure exam were Filipinos. In 2000, this ratio was 43%, still far greater than that of any other nation.

Now that we have some background on pre-1980 migration from the Philippines, we can study New York Times’ immigration explorer map. From the map, the pockets of migration that originated as early as 1906 in Hawaii, California, and Washington still exist today. Back then, the majority of Filipino migrants resided in Hawaii, as it was the nearest U.S. territory and had work available. From the 1980 map, we can see that the majority shifted to California, with smaller populations in Washington, the Great Lakes area, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Florida, and Texas. Between 1980 and 1990, the Philippine-born population nearly doubled (or more) in all of these regions. From 1990 to 2000, this population increased by roughly a quarter. In Los Angeles, California alone, the population grew from 73,000 in 1980, to 161,000 in 1990, to 203,000 in 2000. In New York, the Philippine-born population increased from roughly 21,000 to 55,000. If 2010 data was also included on the map, we would expect to see continued foreign-born population growth, especially in New York, where the population continues to diversify.