Indomitable Canadian Filipinos

Book excerpt: In the 70- year history of Filipino migration to Canada, their number has increased from 770 in 1964 to about a million in 2021. Yet no book has been written and published in Canada about the Filipino community in its entirety. This book fills that vacuum. The first major wave of primarily professional Filipino immigrants, mostly nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals arrived in the 1960s from the U.S. They came to renew their U.S. visas but decided to stay. They were admitted on Canada’s merit-based point system. The succeeding waves of Filipino immigrants came mainly through the government’s Live-in Caregiver Program, the Temporary Foreign Workers Program and the Family Reunification program where requirements for education and technical skills were less demanding. These immigrant programs, with racist undertone, brought them to Canada mainly to do work that most Canadians did not like to do. They felt they were needed as temporary workers but not as citizens. These immigrants were driven to accept these undesirable jobs to escape from poverty and turmoil back home in the hope of achieving a better future in Canada for their children. They came in the prime of life, trained and competent to take on whatever job they could get to survive. And they toiled away quietly minding their own business, raising their children as best as they could while instilling in them the value of good education. But Filipinos are an indomitable lot and can’t be kept down for long. In the last two decades, a new breed of notable young Filipinos has emerged from the shadows and into the light. This book tells how a million Filipino immigrants turned hardships into opportunities and a better life in Canada for their children. This is their contemporary history. This is not a mere collection of published articles. It is an ongoing narrative, linking chapters from Introduction to Conclusion, by academicians, researchers, journalists and essayists who provide the necessary in-depth theorizing and analyzing of the 70-year history of Filipino immigration to Canada.