[Capsicum]

One thing that I was thinking about was the fact that the Philippines is not much more of a large immigrant sending country to the US than to Canada.

Even though Canada has little geopolitical connection or history with the Philippines while the US does as it was under US control for a considerable time (after Spain lost it in the Spanish-American war). The Philippines was under American rule from the latest 1890s to after WWII ended, a significant amount of time, that seems to not be common knowledge for many North Americans.

Usually it seems that occupation, and colonial history leads to a large population of immigrants from the occupied country to the country of the occupier (eg. British and Indians, French and Algerians from their colonies, US and Mexico, Cuba etc. in the Mexican-American and Spanish-American war).

But not in the case of the Philippines and the US (even though much of the time of the Asian exclusion acts was around the time the Philippines was under US rule, there was no exceptionally proportionally large diaspora after independence like Algeria for France or India for Britain).