Like a bolt out of the blue, last week’s bombshell announcement by the US State Department that it was suspending the processing of immigrant visas from 75 countries caught everyone flat-footed, immigration practitioners included.
Since the Philippines has dodged a bullet multiple times in the past, instinctively this corner’s initial reaction was: Did the Philippines finally catch a slug this time?
As it turned out, the Philippines once again ducked a wayward shot —to the enormous relief of the millions of prospective Filipino immigrants and their sponsors in the US.
Remarkably, and despite a number of close calls, America’s oldest defense treaty ally in Asia has avoided being fatally impacted by the barrage of bulleted lists periodically lobbed by the Trump White House against countries whose citizens are either restricted from traveling or migrating to the US, or otherwise slapped with prohibitive fees and entry requirements.
To recall, the first of such near-misses occurred when the Trump administration, as part of its immigration recalibration policy, published in June 2025 a list of countries subject to the resurrected Muslim Travel Ban.
Despite the fact that some of the ban’s inclusion criteria clearly implicated the Philippines — thanks to the elevated number of overstaying Filipinos in America and the country’s lackadaisical security and citizenship vetting practices (bogus birth certificates for sale and a dubious retiree visa program easily come to mind) --- the country deftly eluded the Travel Ban blacklist.
Yet predictably, another close shave almost clipped the Philippines when the Travel Ban list was expanded six months later.
Subsequently, and coming on the heels of the initial Travel Ban’s near-miss incident, the Philippines last August once again dodged a controversial bullet list of undesirable travelers issued (and recently expanded) under the State Department’s new visitor’s visa bond program.
Miraculously, despite the presence of certain inclusion criteria similar to the Travel Ban’s original metrics which could have easily ensnared the Philippines, Filipinos were spared from the prodigious bond requirement under the said program.
Still, the Philippines did not emerge totally unscathed from Uncle Sam’s trigger-happy blitz against the perils of excessive migration. In fact, last year’s surprise announcement imposing an additional $100,000 fee on new H-1B filings has practically become a death knell for H-1B sponsorships involving Filipinos.
Moreover, compounding the pain was the recent revision of the H-1B visa selection process that gives preference to highly skilled and high salaried occupational categories, hastening the demise of entry-level sponsorships generally favored by Filipino workers and their American counterparts.
Apart from the H-1B malady, the Filipinos have also been nursing a different kind of injury, deceptively superficial and yet causing the most damning impact on the country’s collective psyche to date, arising from last year’s widespread apprehensions, detentions, and summary deportations of hundreds of Filipino crewmen serving aboard cruise ships docked in American ports.
Ironically, since possession of child pornography, among a host of alleged violations, was the cited rationale behind the raids, it appears that the Filipinos got nicked by Uncle Sam’s errant shot “down there” — of all places — where it hurt the most.
Will there be other crazy bullets out there in the future? Absolutely. It’s not a question of if, but of when. And how often.