Buwaya Puti, a reader who is a Filipino immigrant to the USA, has been insistent about the idea that he is too a real live American, as American as any Anglo-Saxon posterity of the men who fought the American Revolution. And then President Duterte signed a trade deal with China:
Just to clear a point – or three.
The Philippines didn’t invite you over. When Commodore Dewey sailed into Manila Bay, or when the US army sortied out of Manila to fight the Philippine Army in 1899, these were not welcome acts.
Nor was the building of bases. These were accepted as force majeure, that’s all.
The gratitude, properly, should go the other way. You guys dragged us into WWII, while our government did everything it could to keep us out of it. The Japs attacked us simply because you had bases there.
And because we kept on fighting, for you. The Malays, Indonesians, Siamese were not treated with the grotesque savagery we were because we were a loyal ally. And, dragging us into the war, you incompetently failed to keep up your end, providing pathetically insufficient means to keep your enemies away from our population.
You owe us, big time.
You guys = Americans. Us = Filipinos. Every. Single. Time. To repeat: Immigrants are not, and will never be, Americans. No matter how well they know American history and how much they swear they love baseball.
And even their great-grandchildren will still not be as loyal to America as to their own immigrant roots.
UPDATE: In fairness, Buwaya has pointed out that he is not a US citizen, merely an expat Filipino resident in the USA. However, my contention remains that his core loyalties would remain with his nation even if he accepted the US citizenship for which he is presumably eligible.