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Moments in Time with Bill Ong Hing

Hawaii and API History

Hawaii played an early role in setting the stage for Asian Pacific migration to the West Coast. In particular, recruitment efforts by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association enticed thousands of Japanese, Filipino and Korean laborers who might not otherwise have left their homelands.

For generations, Japan actually banned its nationals from leaving its territories, in part because of the mistreatment that many Japanese endured as foreign workers. But in 1885, an American, who was serving as an agent for the Kingdom of Hawaii as well as an advisor to Japan, arranged for a shipload of Japanese laborers to work in Hawaii. By 1894 about 30,000 Japanese worked on Hawaiian sugar plantations. Over the next 15-year period, private companies recruited another 125,000 Japanese to work in Hawaii. Almost 20,000 were women. Many of this first sizable group remained to establish what soon became a substantial population on the islands. Those who went on to the mainland owned small businesses and worked as tenant farmers in the rural West.

Near the turn of the 19th century, Japan was defeating China (1894-95) and Russia (1904-05) in war on Korean soil, and Japan eventually annexed Korea. Once again an American played a role in getting Koreans to Hawaii. An American Protestant missionary, who also became a U.S. official, befriended the Korean King. In 1902, a representative of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association approached the official, pleading for assistance in recruiting Korean workers. It seems the plantation owners were growing impatient with Japanese plantation workers who were demanding more rights. Japanese work stoppages were common responses to poor pay and work conditions. Between 1902 and 1905, 7,000 Korean workers were recruited to Hawaii. Historian Sucheng Chan has estimated that of that group, a thousand eventually proceeded to the West Coast. Japan’s firm control over Korea by 1910 put an end to any significant Korean emigration during this period.

After 1908 (the Gentlemen’s Agreement), Japan agreed to limit the number of laborers who could travel to the United States, and Hawaiian plantation owners looked to the Philippines for a new source of labor. The Philippines was the perfect target. After the United States’ victory over Spain in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, President McKinley concluded that the people of the Philippines, then a Spanish colony, were “unfit for self-government” and that there was nothing left but to make the Philippines a U.S. possession. As such, Filipinos became non-citizen nationals of the United States, able to travel there freely.

Growers thought Filipinos were well suited to “stoop” labor and were not as aggressive as Japanese or as enterprising as Chinese. They were praised as especially hardworking, submissive and reliable. Despite the arduousness of the work in the sugar and pineapple industries, the steady pay lured many Filipino laborers (most of whom came from the Ilocos region and other economically underdeveloped areas of the Philippines populated by poor peasants and farm workers) who could not earn comparable wages in their home country.

Americans played a role in the poor economy in parts of the Philippines. In 1906, an American attorney went to Washington, D.C. on behalf of Hawaiian plantation owners. They were concerned about the competition that Philippine-grown sugar posed to Hawaiian sugar and succeeded in having a tariff imposed on Philippine sugar.

Between 1907 and 1919, almost 30,000 Filipinos were recruited to Hawaii; between 1920 and 1935, another 50,000 entered. By the late 1920s, Filipino laborers looked beyond Hawaii to the mainland, where the demand for cheap labor, especially in agriculture, also was growing. Although many who came to the mainland during that period were students, most were laborers who came to California predominantly to work on citrus and vegetable farms. But it all started with recruitment to Hawaii.