66 years after the promise

66 years after the promise
Rodel Rodis, Jul 25, 2007

(Under severe time pressure last week, I wrote an unedited 1800 word essay on the origins of the battle for Filipino veterans equity. This week, I had the opportunity to review and edit it, cutting it down to 688 words in my own private battle for brevity. Here it is.)

Sixty-six years ago this week on July 26, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued a military order incorporating Philippine Commonwealth soldiers into the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East (Usaffe) pledging that conscripted Filipinos would be entitled to the same benefits as American soldiers, including the right to apply for U.S. citizenship under a 1940 law.

When they were no longer needed, however, Congress passed the Rescission Act on February 18, 1946 decreeing that Filipino Usaffe soldiers are not be entitled to U.S. veterans’ benefits.

Earlier, in September 1945, the U.S. Attorney General revoked the authority of the naturalization officer at the U.S. Embassy in Manila to process the citizenship applications of Filipino Usaffe soldiers. The U.S. Embassy only began processing their applications in August of 1946, with only four months to the cut-off date, allowing just 4,000 Filipinos – out of 200,000 eligible – to apply for and receive U.S. citizenship.

It was not until a Filipino veteran named Marciano Haw Hibi filed his petition for naturalization in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco on September 13, 1967 that a challenge was made to the government’s actions in 1946.

The U.S. government should be “estopped” from denying his application, Haw Hibi argued, because its “affirmative misconduct” in revoking the naturalization officer’s authority caused the delay. When his petition was denied, Haw Hibi appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in a 6-3 decision on October 23, 1973, affirmed the lower court.

The dissenting Supreme Court justices criticized the majority for ignoring “the deliberate – and successful – effort on the part of agents of the Executive Branch to frustrate the congressional purpose and to deny substantive rights to Filipinos.”

The dissent inspired many veterans to apply for naturalization. In 1976, the cases of 68 veterans were collectively assigned to District Court Judge Charles Renfrew, who ruled in their favor after hearing their impassioned pleas.

After the government initially appealed the Renfrew decision, the administration of President Jimmy Carter withdrew it, allowing the 68 veterans to be sworn in as U.S. citizens.

Following Renfrew, hundreds of “Hibi veterans” filed their applications, causing the Carter Administration to reconsider its position and deny the veterans’ naturalization applications in 1978. The District Court reversed the INS in Mendoza v. INS, ruling that the government was “collaterally estopped” because it withdrew its appeal of the Renfrew decision.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, however, it unanimously denied Mendoza’s petition on January 10, 1984.

The Supreme Court confronted the Filipino veterans issue again in INS v. Pangilinan in 1988, this time on the veterans’ contention that federal courts, as courts of equity, can provide an equitable remedy. The Court ruled unanimously that courts do not have the “equitable power to confer citizenship in violation of the limitations imposed by Congress in the exercise of its exclusive constitutional authority over naturalization.”

The Pangilinan denial effectively ended all efforts by Filipino veterans to obtain relief through the courts, shifting the battleground to Congress. Starting in 1986, members of the U.S. Congress, led by Sen. Daniel Inouye and Rep. Tom Campbell, sponsored bills to grant naturalization to Filipino veterans.

To secure its inclusion in the Immigration Reform Act of 1990, Rep. Campbell assured his colleagues that citizenship would not make the Filipino veterans “eligible for federal benefits which they do not receive.”

With that assurance, Congress included veterans naturalization in the bill, which was signed into law by Pres. George H. Bush on November 30, 1990. The naturalization provision stipulated that its enactment “shall not be construed as affecting the rights, privileges or benefits” of the Filipino veterans, thereby preserving the Rescission Act.

For the next 17 years, the veterans lobbied for passage of the Filipino Veterans Equity Bill, which would rescind the Rescission Act. Last week, the House Veterans Affairs Committee voted to send the veterans’ bill (HR 760) to the full House for a vote. A counterpart bill (S. 1315) in the Senate is also headed for a Senate vote.
Now, 66 years after Roosevelt made his promise, which was betrayed by the Rescission Act, Filipino veterans may finally see his promise redeemed.

Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.