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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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Well, with the Philippines you'd have to enfranchise some 110 (and rapidly growing) millions — a voting bloc an entire third of the entire US population. If you're opting for state-hood, and not some sort of Puerto Rico-tupe non-representative colonial rule, anyway.

Granted, it'll probably be lower in a counterfactual where the Philippines is annexed relatively early on, and receives the "benefits" of modernity (the demographic transition, etc.)—but not infinitesmally smaller; likely the population will still be in the high tens of millions.

I don't really see Americans accepting that: tens of millions of icky brown people with voting rights and significant sway over US politics inherent to their population size alone. I'll note the US has often been wary of directly annexing territories full of non-white people (densely populated, anyway): one of the main arguments against taking more of Mexico historically, besides just the Cession, was that other areas had too many Mexicans to drive off.

(That's not even asking whether Filipinos want US statehood to begin with. Actually, they might, especially if the US dumps a lot of money into investing in the place, and making it a model example of how Murica Gets Shit Done TM, but then you circle again to Americans, running into the same generalized xenophobic arguments over tax monies going to not-properly-non-melanated Americans.)

The Philippines, assuming they were one state and maybe throw in some other islands, would have been the most populous state circa 1950, but were more like 15% of the total population.

Of course in my totally crazy counterfactual, the USA encourages white migration into the Philippines, and allows free migration from the Philippines to the mainland, balancing the ethnic questions a little differently. Hawaii made statehood despite a lack of whites.

Imagine the strategic history of Asia with tens of millions of American citizens right there.