The Philippine Repatriation Act of 1935 has been largely overlooked in legal scholarship. The Act offered federally funded passage to Filipino Americans who “voluntarily” sought to return to the Philippines. It was passed in the wake of the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, which set the Philippines, a U.S. territory since 1898, on the path to independence, and simultaneously reclassified all Filipinos, both in the archipelago and in the United States, from U.S. nationals to “aliens,” and subjected them to U.S. immigration law. When read alongside the Tydings-McDuffie Act, the Philippine Repatriation Act emerges not as a voluntary repatriation program but rather as part of a coordinated legal architecture designed to deport Filipinos from the United States. 

This Essay argues that the Philippine Repatriation Act’s promise of “voluntary” return was a legal fiction, a word chosen to make a coercive removal program appear beneficent. That this happened to Filipinos was not incidental. It was the manifestation of American empire working itself out through immigration law. Stripped of their U.S. national status by the Tydings-McDuffie Act and suddenly subject to immigration law, Filipinos in the United States faced a hollow choice between accepting a government subsidized departure and remaining in a country that had just legally redefined them as noncitizens. Reading the two statutes together reveals a coordinated legal scheme in which the language of choice masked the mechanics of expulsion. Notably, the concept of “voluntary” removal has reappeared in the form of contemporaneous policies that promote coerced self deportations. Overall, this Essay underscores enduring patterns in how the United States constructs the boundaries of belonging through immigration and citizenship laws.