Alien prostitutes can be expelled from the Philippine Islands in conformity with an Act of congress. The Governor-General can order the eviction of undesirable aliens after a hearing from the Islands. Act No. 519 of the Philippine Commission and section 733 of the Revised Ordinances of the city of Manila provide for the conviction and punishment by a court of justice of any person who is a common prostitute. Act No. 899 authorizes the return of any citizen of the United States, who may have been convicted of vagrancy, to the homeland. New York and other States have statutes providing for the commitment to the House of Refuge of women convicted of being common prostitutes. Always a law! Even when the health authorities compel vaccination, or establish a quarantine, or place a leprous person in the Culion leper colony, it is done pursuant to some law or order. But one can search in vain for any law, order, or regulation, which even hints at the right of the Mayor of the city of Manila or the chief of police of that city to force citizens of the Philippine Islands — and these women despite their being in a sense lepers of society are nevertheless not chattels but Philippine citizens protected by the same constitutional guaranties as are other citizens — to change their domicile from Manila to another locality. On the contrary, Philippine penal law specifically punishes any public officer who, not being expressly authorized by law or regulation, compels any person to change his residence.In other countries, as in Spain and Japan, the privilege of domicile is deemed so important as to be found in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Under the American constitutional system, liberty of abode is a principle so deeply imbedded in jurisprudence and considered so elementary in nature as not even to require a constitutional sanction. Even the Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, even the President of the United States, who has often been said to exercise more power than any king or potentate, has no such arbitrary prerogative, either inherent or express. Much less, therefore, has the executive of a municipality, who acts within a sphere of delegated powers. If the mayor and the chief of police could, at their mere behest or even for the most praiseworthy of motives, render the liberty of the citizen so insecure, then the presidents and chiefs of police of one thousand other municipalities of the Philippines have the same privilege. If these officials can take to themselves such power, then any other official can do the same. And if any official can exercise the power, then all persons would have just as much right to do so. And if a prostitute could be sent against her wishes and under no law from one locality to another within the country, then officialdom can hold the same club over the head of any citizen. (Villavicencio vs. Lukban; G.R. No. 14639, March 25, 1919)
