Philippine Immigration Act of 1940

Also known as: Commonwealth Act No. 613 · CA 613 · Philippine Immigration Act · Immigration Act of 1940

Definition

The Philippine Immigration Act of 1940, officially Commonwealth Act No. 613 and formally “An Act to Control and Regulate the Immigration of Aliens into the Philippines,” is the basic immigration statute of the Philippines — the Commonwealth-era law that consolidated alien entry, admission, exclusion, deportation, and registration into a single code and created the Bureau of Immigration that still administers it. The Act was passed by the Second National Assembly on January 22, 1940 and carries the statute-book approval date of August 26, 1940; the Bureau’s own history also records it as signed into law by the President of the United States on September 3, 1940, the residue of the Commonwealth’s reserved-powers arrangement. It remains in force, as amended, more than eight decades later. (ChanRobles — CA 613, Wikipedia — Philippine Immigration Act, Bureau of Immigration — History)

The Act’s core mechanism is the nationality quota. Section 13 admits as “quota immigrants” no more than fifty aliens of any one nationality (or without nationality) per calendar year — a ceiling reduced by amendment from the original five hundred — beside non-quota immigrants (spouses and unmarried minor children of Philippine citizens, children born abroad of Filipino mothers, former Filipino women who lost citizenship by marriage, and returning residents). Section 9 supplies the non-immigrant categories — temporary visitors, transit passengers, seamen, treaty traders and investors, accredited officials, students, and prearranged-employment visa holders — while Section 29 lists seventeen exclusion classes and Section 37 thirteen grounds for deportation. The statute is enforced today by the Bureau of Immigration, attached to the Department of Justice, whose institutional history this site’s Bureau of Immigration entry records. (ChanRobles — CA 613, Bureau of Immigration — History)

Identities

Source	Identifier	URL
Wikipedia	Philippine Immigration Act	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Immigration_Act
Wikidata	Philippine Immigration Act (Q19034238)	https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19034238
DBpedia	N/A	N/A
ProductOntology	N/A	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A	N/A
MeSH	N/A	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A	N/A
Google Scholar	Philippine Immigration Act of 1940 Commonwealth Act 613 quota aliens exclusion deportation Bureau of Immigration Philippines	N/A
ConceptNet	N/A	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A	N/A

Also Known As

Commonwealth Act No. 613
CA 613
Philippine Immigration Act
Immigration Act of 1940

Examples and Analogies

A gate with a metering valve: the quota works like a water meter on a main line — admission depends not on merit alone but on a fixed annual allotment per nationality, fifty slots under the amended Section 13, so demand from any one country can exceed its supply many times over.
Two doors and an exit: the Act imagines movement through three checkpoints — the visa door (Section 9 categories), the border door (Section 29 exclusion classes applied by inspectors and the Board of Special Inquiry), and the exit (Section 37 deportation for aliens who entered or stayed unlawfully) — a structure any modern traveler will recognize from the bureau counters at the airport.
Verified statutory data:
Long title: “An Act to Control and Regulate the Immigration of Aliens into the Philippines”
Passage: Second National Assembly, January 22, 1940; approval August 26, 1940; recorded U.S. presidential signature September 3, 1940
Institutions created: Bureau of Immigration under a Commissioner of Immigration with First and Second Deputy Commissioners (Section 2); Board of Commissioners deciding by concurrence of any two members (Section 8); Boards of Special Inquiry (Sections 26–27)
Quota: fifty immigrants of any one nationality per calendar year (Section 13, as amended from an original five hundred)
Non-immigrant sections: (a) temporary visitor, (b) transit, (c) seaman, (d) treaty trader or investor, (e) accredited official, (f) student above high school, (g) prearranged employment
Exclusion and deportation: seventeen exclusion classes in Section 29(a); thirteen deportation grounds in Section 37(a), most subject to a five-year limitation (Section 37(b))
Repeal clause: Section 52 sweeps away prior immigration laws except Section 69 of the Administrative Code (Act No. 2711)
Status: in force, as amended

Usage Scenarios

1. Applying for and Adjudicating Visas

Foreign nationals and the Bureau’s visa officers work through Section 9 daily: a tourist’s 9(a) temporary-visitor visa, a student’s 9(f) visa for schooling above high school, a 9(g) prearranged-employment visa for a hired manager — each with its own conditions, documents, and authorized stay. (ChanRobles — CA 613)

2. Inspection and Exclusion at the Port

Immigration inspectors examine arriving aliens at ports of entry; where an arrival is not “clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to land,” the case goes to a Board of Special Inquiry under Sections 26 and 27, and the seventeen exclusion classes of Section 29(a) — from contagious disease and moral-turpitude convictions to likely-public-charge status and improper documentation — supply the grounds for turning an arrival back. (ChanRobles — CA 613)

3. Deportation Proceedings

The Bureau initiates deportation under Section 37(a) on grounds such as entry by fraud, moral-turpitude convictions, prostitution, violating non-immigrant conditions, or subversive advocacy — with notice and hearing guaranteed by Section 37(c), a five-year limitation on most grounds under Section 37(b), and the burden of proving lawful entry placed on the alien by Section 37(d). (ChanRobles — CA 613)

4. Quota and Non-Quota Immigration

Practitioners compute eligibility under the two tracks of Section 13: the fifty-per-nationality quota for ordinary immigrants, and the non-quota list for family reunification and return — to which Republic Act No. 4376 (June 19, 1965) added natural-born Filipinos naturalized abroad who return permanently with spouse and minor children. (ChanRobles — CA 613, Wikipedia — Philippine Immigration Act)

5. Tracing the Statutory Lineage

Legal researchers use the Act as the hinge of Philippine immigration history — the statute that absorbed the customs-era Chinese registration regime of Act No. 702 (1903) and the 1937 labor-division interlude, and whose amending acts map policy across the Commonwealth, Republic, and martial-law eras. (Bureau of Immigration — History, Wikipedia — Philippine Immigration Act)

Strategies

Read the Act by its architecture: visa (Section 9) — quota (Section 13) — exclusion (Section 29) — deportation (Section 37): the four questions in any alien’s case are which visa, what quota, is the alien excludable, and is the alien deportable. (ChanRobles — CA 613)
Cite the statute before the regulations: practice runs from CA 613’s sections outward to implementing rules and Bureau issuances; the Act’s categories remain the spine that administrative orders flesh out.
Check the amendment before the section: several key provisions are not as enacted in 1940 — the quota was cut from five hundred to fifty, Section 22-A was added by RA 144 (1947), Section 9(d) was recast for international traders and investors by RA 5171 (1967), and fees were rewritten by PD 524 (1974). (ChanRobles — CA 613, Wikipedia — Philippine Immigration Act)
Pair the statute with the agency’s history: the Act created the Bureau but not today’s departmental home — supervision ran from the Office of the President (1940) to Justice, Labor (1945), and back to Justice (1948), with the 1972–1987 interlude as the Commission on Immigration and Deportation. (Bureau of Immigration — History)
Date the pre-Act regime precisely: before 1940 the operative instruments were the Chinese registration act administered by customs from 1899, then a Bureau of Labor division from 1937 — the regime CA 613 replaced. (Bureau of Immigration — History)

Security and Safety Measures

Border screening as the founding safeguard: the exclusion classes of Section 29(a) — health, criminal, moral, economic, and documentary grounds — were designed as the country’s comprehensive first screen of arrivals, the statutory security architecture later regimes amended rather than replaced. (ChanRobles — CA 613)
Deportation only upon notice and hearing: Section 37(c) guarantees procedural safeguards, Section 37(b) imposes time limits on most grounds, and Section 37(d) places the burden of proving lawful entry on the alien — the due-process skeleton of every removal case since. (ChanRobles — CA 613)
Collegial decision-making: the Board of Commissioners (Section 8) and the Boards of Special Inquiry (Sections 26–27) disperse adjudication across three-member bodies rather than a single officer, a structural check built into the 1940 statute. (ChanRobles — CA 613)
Documentary control: the certificates, visas, and registration records the Act requires give the state a paper trail for every admission — the ancestor of today’s alien certificate of registration and e-Travel border system. (ChanRobles — CA 613, Bureau of Immigration — History)
Registration continuity: the Act carried forward, in consolidated form, the registration logic of the 1903 Chinese registration statute, keeping the state’s ledger of resident aliens current. (Bureau of Immigration — History)

Historical Context

Before 1940 the Philippines policed aliens indirectly. Immigration work began in 1899 as a division of the Bureau of Customs, its chief instrument Act No. 702 of the Philippine Commission enforcing the registration of Chinese persons under the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act; in 1937 the functions moved to a division under the Bureau of Labor, amid official concern over Chinese-operated trade houses, stores, and restaurants. The Commonwealth’s Second National Assembly passed the Philippine Immigration Act on January 22, 1940 — approval August 26, 1940, U.S. presidential signature recorded September 3, 1940 — creating the Bureau of Immigration under the Office of the President, with quotas, exclusions, deportations, and the Board machinery still in use. (Bureau of Immigration — History, ChanRobles — CA 613)

The Act then accumulated the amendments that map Philippine political history: Republic Acts 118, 135, and 144 (all 1947) adjusted fees and added Section 22-A in the immediate postwar years; RA 503 (1950), RA 749 and RA 827 (1952), RA 1901 (1957), RA 4376 (1965), RA 5171 (1967), and RA 5701 (1969) recast quota treatment, treaty-trader entry, and procedures; and Presidential Decree No. 524 (1974) rewrote the fee schedule under martial law. The implementing agency was reorganized in turn — Letter of Implementation No. 20 (December 31, 1972) recast the Bureau as the Commission on Immigration and Deportation, and Executive Order No. 292 (July 25, 1987) restored the Bureau’s name within the Department of Justice — while the Act of 1940 remained, as amended, the governing statute. (Wikipedia — Philippine Immigration Act, Bureau of Immigration — History, ChanRobles — CA 613)

Challenges and Controversies

The Quota’s Racial Origins and Effects

The Act’s nationality quota — five hundred per nationality at enactment, fifty after amendment — descended from the pre-1940 regime built around the Chinese Exclusion Act’s extension to the archipelago, and legal historians read Section 13 and the exclusion classes as the codification of an exclusionary, anti-Chinese frame into the Commonwealth’s first comprehensive immigration law. The statute’s own Section 52, repealing prior immigration laws, marks the consolidation. (ChanRobles — CA 613, Bureau of Immigration — History)

The 1940 Approval Dates

The Act’s chronology requires careful sourcing: the statute text is approved August 26, 1940, yet the Bureau’s official history records passage by the Second National Assembly on January 22, 1940 and signature by the U.S. President on September 3, 1940 — the reserved-powers residue under which immigration legislation required American approval. Researchers do well to cite the date appropriate to the question asked. (ChanRobles — CA 613, Bureau of Immigration — History)

Age and Amendment Load

Eighty-plus years of amendments — eleven Republic Acts and a Presidential Decree by the documented count — have kept the 1940 text in force while layering fees, categories, and procedures across eras; the standing critique is that a quota statute drafted for the Commonwealth fits poorly the age of labor migration, tourism, and trafficking concerns. (Wikipedia — Philippine Immigration Act, ChanRobles — CA 613)

Enforcement Scandals in the Modern Bureau

The statute’s machinery has been tested by the enforcement record of its implementing agency — the “pastillas” bribery scheme and the Alice Guo escape of 2024 among the documented matters this site’s Bureau of Immigration entry catalogs — controversies that concern the Bureau’s administration of CA 613 rather than the Act’s text. (Bureau of Immigration — History)