Immigration to the Philippines is the process by which people migrate to the Philippines to reside in the country. Many, but not all, become citizens of the Philippines. History Prehistorical migration Modern theories of the peopling of the Philippines islands are interpreted against the wider backdrop of the migrations of the Austronesian peoples. They comprise two major schools of thought, the "Out of Sundaland" models and the "Out of Taiwan" model. Of the two, however, the most widely accepted hypothesis is the Out-of-Taiwan model, which largely corresponds to linguistic, genetic, archaeological, and cultural evidence. It has since been strengthened by genetic and archaeological studies that broadly agree with the timeline of the Austronesian expansion. Migration during the Spanish period By the 16th century, Spanish colonization brought new groups of people to the Philippines mainly Spaniards and Mexicans. Many settled in the Philippines, and intermarried with the indigenous population. This gave rise to the Filipino mestizo or individuals of mixed Austronesian and Hispanic descent. There was migration of a military nature from Latin-America (Mexico and Peru) to the Philippines, composed of varying races (Amerindian, Mestizo and Criollo) as described by Stephanie J. Mawson in her book "Convicts or Conquistadores? Spanish Soldiers in the Seventeenth-Century Pacific". Also, in her dissertation paper called, ‘Between Loyalty and Disobedience: The Limits of Spanish Domination in the Seventeenth Century Pacific’, she recorded an accumulated number of 15,600 soldier-settlers sent to the Philippines from Latin-America during the 1600s. In which timeframe, the total population of the Philippines was only about 667,612. Old Spanish censuses state that as much as 33.5% or one third of the population of the main island of Luzon had full or partial Hispanic or Latino (Mestizo, Mulatto and Native-American) descent. The current modern-day Chinese Filipinos are mostly the descendants of immigrants from Southern Fujian in China from the 20th century and late 19th century, possibly numbering around 2 million, although there are an estimated 27 percent of Filipinos who have partial Chinese ancestry, stemming from precolonial and colonial Chinese (Sangley) migrants from the past centuries especially during the Spanish Colonial Era. Intermarriage between the groups is evident in the major cities and urban areas, and spans back to Spanish colonial times, where a colonial middle-class group known as the Mestizo de Sangley (Chinese mestizos) descend from. Its descendants during the late 19th century produced a major part of the ilustrado intelligentsia of the