THE underly

Report hits out at CNMI's "inadequate" reforms

ing immigra

tion, labour, and trade problems of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) remain as trou

blesome as ever, despite a year’s worth of reforms set in motion by the recently elected Governor of the islands, according to a US federal report.

According to the report, the US Administration “continues to be concerned about the CNMI’s heavy and unhealthy dependence upon an indentured alien worker program and on trade loopholes to expand its economy”.

It said that as a result of this reliance, the labour, immigration and law enforce ment problems in the CNMI continue.

“Of continuing concern is the emer gence of serious secondary problems such as worker exploitation and ineffective bor der control, which are symptomatic of the CNMFs labour and immigration policies,” it stated.

The document is the Fourth Annual Report of the Federal-CNMI Initiative on Labour, Immigration, and Law- Enforcement that was issued by the Clinton Administration December 30 last year.

The Initiative was set in motion by Congress four years ago to address prob lems within the CNMI, a group of islands just north of Guam in the Western Pacific.

The CNMI is a US territory, but has, at the moment, control of its own immigra tion and minimum wage policies.

However the US is concerned that under these policies, CNMI has experi enced a major migrant population explo sion.

The CNMI has experienced a self

imposed explosive population growth of

about 250 percent in the decade and a half from 1980 to 1995 with the total popula tion growth from 17,000 to 60,000.

“A startling 91 per cent of the jobs in the private sector are held by temporary alien workers and more are arriving daily,” the report said. This is even though unem ployment and poverty rates among locally bom US citizens are very high, 14.2 per cent and 35 per cent respectively.

While the Federal Government acknowledged the reform efforts of

Governor Pedro P. Tenorio, elected in the fall of 1997, “these efforts have done noth ing about the three basic problems in the CNMI,” according to Allen P Stayman, Director of the Office of Insular Affairs of the US Department of the Interior.

He said reforms had failed to reduce the local economy’s dependency on temporary foreign workers.

They had also failed to reduce the local economy’s dependency on transitory trade

Marianas heavy reliance

on an indentured alien

worker programme and

trade loopholes criticised

in recently released US

federal report

loopholes which, Stayman said, were based on local control of immigration and minimum wage laws.

He said these allowed the transplanted Asian garment industry to ship a billion dollars worth of garments to the United States duty-free, quota-free and to unfairly use the “Made in the USA” label”.

He said the CNMI government had failed to agree to the full implementation of the Covenant - the document that estab lished the ground rules for the relationship between the CNMI and the Federal gov ernment.

The Covenant envisioned the eventual application of the normal immigration and minimum wage laws to the islands, but Stayman said “the CNMI has refused to move ahead, or even to discuss a transition period”.

As a result of the minimal potential Federal involvement in the local labour market, there have been numerous media reports (Reader’s Digest, Time,

Philadelphia Inquirer, ABC-TV’s “20/20”,

etc.) regarding sweatshop working and liv ing conditions, discrimination against pregnant workers (including some reports of coerced abortions and deportations back to the Peoples Republic of China), as well

as wide-spread statements than alien workers must pay middlemen from $3,000 to $7,000 to secure jobs that, at best, pay $3.15 an hour.

As four Cabinet offi cers (the Attomey-

General, and the Secretaries of Commerce, Labour and Interior) wrote to the Vice President in October “for close to 15 years - through the Reagan and Bush Administration and now during the Clinton Administration - federal officials have expressed deep concern about the CNMFs growing dependence on indentured alien labour paid at unfairly low minimum wages to build its economy. In the past five years we have found that conditions have deteriorated . . . including failure to pay wages, poor living, poor living and work ing conditions, even incidence of ‘hidden’ contracts forbidding the exercise of politi cal and religious rights”.

The report re-affirmed the Administration’s determination to support legislation that would apply the normal immigration and minimum wage laws to the islands, after a substantial transition period.

The legislation would also require that goods made in the Marianas would be eli gible for duty-and quota-free entry into the United States only if 50 per cent of the work was done by US citizen labour.

The departing Congress did not pass such legislation, although a bill dealing with these issues was reported out of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in the summer of 1998.

As to the work of the local government, the report states: “Immediately before and after the Senate hearing in March 1998 the CNMI began to enforce local immigration and labour laws through aggressive raids and inspections of garment factories, night clubs and construction projects and to step up deportations and prosecutions of over staying non-resident workers”.

The report concluded, however, that: “While the new Governor’s promises are well-intentioned, there continue to be seri ous concerns about the depth, efficacy and longevity of local reform efforts”.

In the recent past, local laws designed to increase the minimum wage or reduce the number of alien workers have been repealed, or otherwise vitiated, months or years later. ■