‘‘Immigration Blues’’ won the New Letters award for fiction from the University of Missouri at Kansas City in 1977. In 1978 it was listed as an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories. In 1981 the second edition of Scent of Apples, the book in which the story appears, received an American Book Award from New York’s Pre-Columbus Federation.

Anthony Tan, writing in Silliman Journal, calls the stories in Scent of Apples ‘‘emotionally poignant’’ and says ‘‘Immigration Blues’’ is ‘‘a story of understated pathos and the very human and selfish motive of marriage for convenience.’’ He also notes that all the stories in Scent of Apples share the common themes of ‘‘exile, loneliness, and isolation.’’

Tan argues that the stories fall short of greatness because the characters are left groping in states of isolation, denied a moment of illumination that would enable them to make sense of their lives. However, Maxine Hong Kingston, writing in the New York Times Book Review, takes the view that Santos ‘‘places . . . rare incidents of joy at the center of his stories.’’ She also praises Santos’s ‘‘very delicate, very fine’’ writing that ‘‘gently’’ portrays the difficult experience of being a Filipino man in America.

‘‘Immigration Blues’’ exhibits the simplicity of style that some critics in the Philippines have seen as a fault in Santos’s work. But Miguel A. Bernad, writing in Bamboo and the Greenwood Tree: Essays on Filipino Literature in English, views this simplicity as a virtue. He writes of Santos’s short stories:

The language is simple but weighted with emotion. It is pitched in low key, but the emotion is implicit in the tone, atmosphere, narrative tempo, length or brevity of sentence, the rhythm that sometimes approaches musicality, and the sparing but carefully chosen imagery.