in violation of the McCarran Act and the Smith Act, laws that limited communist activity, and deported radicals from the United States.51 Due to her membership in the Communist Party, she could not become a United States citizen. In the midst of her legal struggles against deportation, Jones suffered heart failure and was hospitalized several times for treatment of coronary heart disease and hypertension. In 1955, Jones was detained for nine months while awaiting deportation. While detained, her colleagues petitioned successfully for her release based on her health. Her colleagues also tried to delay her deportation by requesting a stay because of her health.52
Claudia Jones was not deported. Due to her radical views, Great Britain did not want her in Trinidad, which was still a British colony. But because of her influence, they instead offered Jones citizenship in Great Britain.53 She took the offer and left for Britain in 1955. Jones became an even more popular figure in Britain, contributing to the rise of the British Communist Party. Scholars believe that Jones was to the left of Karl Marx, because Jones believed that capitalism alone did not account for racism and sexism. Ironically, Jones is buried to the left of Karl Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery.54
Claudia Jones challenged the idea of citizenship and belonging being based solely on the circumstance of her birth. She was brought here as a child and raised in the United States. Her political work is what caused her deportation, because the United States considered radical thought to be threatening and inherently foreign, even though Jones was as American as one could be.
Jones referred to her deportation as an exile, pointing out that instead of being forced to go back to her origin, she was being banished.55 In due course, long-term residents, people brought here as children, and people with family ties in the United States, would challenge deportation by adopting a similar language to evoke the pathos of exile.
As we will explore more in the next chapter, immigration enforcement continues to be predicated on excluding those who are deemed a threat or perceived as unfit for US citizenship. The United States continues to deny citizenship to people who have ever been associated with the Communist Party.56
Celestino Almeda and the Filipino War Veterans
Before World War II, Asian Americans were an explicit object of racial discrimination under immigration law, which declared all new Asian arrivals as ineligible for US citizenship. But during World War II, Congress granted enlistees the right to naturalize, regardless of their national origin or manner of entry. Until the war ended, this gave all immigrants an incentive to serve and a way for them to naturalize. Between 1943 and 1946, the United States sent naturalization officers from post to post throughout England, Iceland, North Africa, and the Pacific, naturalizing thousands of foreign nationals who were serving with the United States.
Since the United States was in control of the Philippines when the Japanese army invaded the country in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a presidential order to bring all military forces in the Philippines under US control and as an incentive, allowed Filipino enlistees to become United States citizens if they filed applications by the end of 1946.57 Before and during the war, Filipinos were considered American nationals, similar to the designation afforded to American Samoans today. At least 250,000 Filipinos answered the call to serve and fought with American forces in World War II against Japanese forces. After the war, in 1946, the Treaty of Manila relinquished US sovereignty, and declared the Philippines an independent nation even while retaining military bases on the island. Fearful that thousands of Filipino veterans would now be eligible for the benefits promised to them during the war, the United States stripped recognition from Filipino soldiers through the Rescission Act of 1946, and it explicitly barred these war veterans from rights, privileges, or benefits. As the cherry on top, the United States also removed a stationed naturalization officer in the Philippines before the war was over, depriving many enlistees the opportunity to even apply to become citizens of the United States.58
World War II compelled the United States to ease citizenship barriers; the country came face to face with its hypocrisy as it fought a war against Nazis abroad while openly discriminating against racial and ethnic groups at home. Congress abolished naturalization quotas with regard to Chinese in 1943, Indians, and Filipinos in 1946, and Japanese and all others, regardless of nationality in 1952.59 Finally, in 1965, Congress eliminated racial quotas in immigration law, and opened the door to immigration based on family and employment.60 The changes allowed new Filipino immigrants to come to the United States, and reinvigorated the desire to emigrate to the US among Filipino veterans, who were now middle-aged.
After almost twenty years, Filipino veterans finally began their struggle to recapture the immigration and military benefits that were denied them at the end of World War II. The first veteran to challenge the denial was Marciano Haw Hibi.
Born in Manila in 1917, Hibi enlisted in the Philippines Scouts, a United States Army unit, in 1941.61 He was captured by Japanese soldiers and released after six months of internment. In April 1945, after the liberation of the Philippines, Hibi rejoined the Scouts and served until his honorable discharge in December 1945. Hibi entered the United States in 1964 on a visitor-for-business visa and filed for naturalization. He asserted that even though he served in the war, the United States failed to inform him of his right to naturalize in due time, and this amounted to affirmative misconduct. In 1967 the district court agreed with Hibi, and the Ninth Circuit upheld the decision, but the Supreme Court dismissed his case on appeal in 1973.62
Inspired by Hibi, other Filipino war veterans filed similar lawsuits—individually and in class actions, alleging that the United States had acted in bad faith in 1945 by removing the only naturalization officer in the Philippines, to ensure that veterans would not be able to naturalize in time.63 They ultimately lost the class action, but their plight reached the ears of some in Congress. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed a law offering citizenship to all Filipino war veterans still alive.64 In this manner, some Filipino war veterans finally became United States citizens, but about fifty years late.
However, even with United States citizenship, the struggle of these veterans continued. Many who immigrated died without reuniting with their sons and daughters, because the sponsorship process to bring them from the Philippines took so long. Of the 4,500 still alive, many were denied benefits under the law.
One example was Celestino Almeda. Before World War II he was a vocational industrial arts instructor in a high school in the Philippines. In 1941 he answered President Roosevelt’s call and enrolled in active duty with the Anti-Sabotage Regiment65 of the US Philippine Commonwealth Army Forces.66 He was honorably discharged in 1946 and kept meticulous records of his service. Almeda finally became a US citizen in 1996. However, since many records had been destroyed or erased, his name was not in the Army’s National Personnel Records, so despite having gained citizenship, he was denied veteran benefits and recognition for his service.
In 2009, the Obama administration provided one-time payments: $15,000 for US citizens and $9,000 for Filipino citizens.67 By the end of 2017, $226 million had been awarded to more than twenty-two thousand people. But Department of Veterans Affairs records also show that more than half of the applicants who tried to qualify were denied. Until recently, Almeda was one of them.
Almeda represented the American Coalition for Filipino Veterans as a spokesperson and testified before Congress.68 A resident of Gaithersburg, Maryland, Almeda became a regular feature in the hallways of congressional buildings. He spoke to as many legislators as he could about the plight of war veterans such as himself who had served honorably but had been cast aside. In 2017, at the age of one hundred, Almeda finally received $15,000 from the Department of Veteran Affairs.69 He also received a Congressional Gold Medal—the highest civilian honor bestowed by Congress—and many salutes from members of Congress.70
Alas, many thousands died awaiting the day the United States would recognize their service. Regardless of what one may think of military service, the United States foreclosed a path to citizenship, rescinded veteran’s benefits,
