THREE Filipino-Americans recently took their oath of office as reelected members of the Honolulu City Council maintaining the ethnic community’s four-man presence in the city council.
The newly reelected officials are Council members Kymberly Marcos Pine, Joey Manahan and Ron Menor. The fourth Filipino-American in the nine-member Honolulu City Council is Council member Brandon Elefante.
The ethnic Filipino officials took their oaths before Supreme Court Associate Justice Sabrina McKenna in the presence of Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell, Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho, former Governor John Waihee III and special guest Philippine Consul General Gina Jamoralin.
According to the last US Census, Filipinos make up the second-largest ethnic group in Hawaii with almost 200,000 citizens who identified themselves as being of Filipino ethnicity, surpassing ethnic Japanese.
Unlike in previous censuses, there are more ethnic Filipinos who now identify themselves as Filipinos and Hawaii’s Filipino-American community is believed to be the strongest in the United States, according to Dr. Amy Agbayani of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
“We’re number one in the number of immigrants coming in every year, and we have been since 1965,” she said.
Filipinos have been emigrating to Hawaii between 1906 and 1910 when there was a need for workers in Hawaii’s sugarcane plantations.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed more Filipinos to bring family to Hawaii and this allowed more Filipino arrivals, particularly Filipino women, to enter the state.
The increase in arrivals also caused some backlash with Filipinos claiming various degrees of discrimination, particularly in the 1970s.
In 2010, the US census showed that Filipinos surpassed Japanese as Hawaii’s largest ethnic group with a total population of 342,095 of which 197,497 were full Filipinos, the total population of Japanese was 312,292 of which 185,502 were full Japanese.
According to surveys conducted by the American Community Survey showed that Filipinos overtook Japanese between 2007 and 2008.
