California’s growers were still dependent on low-wage nonwhite workers, especially with the labor demand crunch of World War I, which meant they had to get by on loopholes. Fearing the quota consequences, growers began importing Filipino workers in large numbers starting in 1923, and they attracted over 30,000 workers to the state by the end of the decade.46 As American nationals (the Philippines was a U.S. territory at the time), Filipinos were entitled to travel freely within the American empire; as phenotypically distinguishable from whites and Mexicans, they could be relegated by growers to a lower wage tier. It didn’t seem to hurt that most Filipinos spoke English and were familiar with American customs and culture. With racial wage scales came a segregated production process: lower-wage Mexican and Filipino workers were overused in the fields, while higher-wage whites worked in the packing sheds and canneries. In the beginning, the Filipino immigrants worked for the lowest wages and under the worst conditions—their pay documented at under $10 a month—but the young Filipino men proved more assimilable in practice than growers and policy makers imagined. With their fluent English and American nationality, Filipino immigrants felt entitled to interact with white women, whether on the beaches or at the taxi dance halls, where (still relatively scarce in the state) women danced one-on-one in exchange for ticket vouchers. Under the law, the Filipino men weren’t wrong; though California had banned marriages between whites and “Negroes and mulattoes” since 1850, adding “Mongolians” in 1905, Filipinos were “Malay” under the original eighteenth-century racial typology.47 California, having relied on the broad stretch of the Asiatic Barred Zone to exclude South Asians up to that point, did not include them in the anti-miscegenation statute. But in 1933, as Filipino farmers posed an increasing sexual threat to white men (and as they organized for higher wages), the state added “Malay” to the rule.