Somebody has to say something

I arrived on Saipan in July 1998, experiencing one of the most successful private sector economic expansions in Pacific Island history. Today, the CNMI is in the throes of a serious economic depression, which shows no sign of abating or recovering even in the distant future.

What happened?

The Covenant says this: “United States will assist the Government of the Northern Marianas to achieve a progressively higher standard of living for its people as part of the American economic community and to develop the economic resources needed to meet the financial responsibilities of local self-government.”

This is an excerpt from a report done by Anthony Solomon, then professor of Business Administration at Harvard University during the Kennedy era. The report was called The Report by the United States Survey Mission to the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, but has come to be known as the Solomon Report, and referred to America’s ruthless blueprint for the assimilation of Micronesia.

“[The] Solomon Report…clearly laid out a strategy. …The U.S. would pump large amounts of money into Micronesia, build a community-service infrastructure, establish a host of development programs and a dependency upon cash, hold a plebiscite at the point at which the Micronesians’ hopes had been raised, and then pull back support as the various development programs failed to succeed.”

Sounds familiar?

A report funded by the Department of the Interior called Economic Impact of Federal Laws on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands had this to say: “The Covenant worked well in the first several decades for the CNMI. The federal application of the minimum wage and immigration provisions of the Covenant is now destroying the CNMI economy in contravention to the Covenant itself. Obviously, something has gone seriously wrong.

“Despite these serious admonitions, Congress acted to apply the federal minimum wage and immigration laws to the CNMI at the onset of its economic depression. Unfortunately, little thought appears to have been given to the effects of this legislation on the CNMI’s economy. Congress requested a GAO study of the impact of the immigration legislation on the CNMI economy but passed that legislation before all study findings and recommendations were available. In the case of the minimum wage legislation, a study was performed by the U.S. Department of Labor after the Act was passed. Both included scenarios under which economic disaster could occur in the CNMI.

“All of this was done with the full federal knowledge of the likely adverse economic effects on the CNMI. It appears now that the only real hope is to persuade the federal government, the Congress or the courts that the U.S. must begin taking its territories and its responsibilities to them more seriously. It must remedy what it has done to the CNMI.”

I couldn’t agree more!

In order to maintain the status quo the U.S. has created this fictional state where we are neither American citizens nor a sovereign state.

“This effort to expose these wrongs is undertaken even though this colonial setting is so complex and so subtle that many who are affected by it actually accept it, the systematic denial of the full complement of rights of a group of citizens just because of racial constructions or colonial fiction needs to be exposed and addressed in order to challenge the rhetoric that is supposed to be the foundation of democracy.”

Everyone is waiting to see what status the U.S. is going to bestow on the thousands of out-of-work, displaced immigrants who have been hanging around our islands in limbo for the past year. What we should be asking ourselves is what’s up with this non-status they’ve given us. Without representation or a vote we’re like a dog on a chain.

I know there’s going to be different opinions on this, but one good reason for leaving those immigrants just hanging around when something this important to our stagnating economy is at stake, instead of responsibly dealing with this problem a year ago, is because if the economy gets bad enough everyone will be pointing fingers at the immigrants instead of the real cause for our demise.

There’s no nice way to say this: “The United States of America has [expletive] us.” We have no future because there is no way we can ever achieve economic recovery under the conditions they’ve subjected us to. And what guarantee do we have that the budget cuts we’ve seen this year aren’t going to increase in the near future?

We have to reopen the Covenant, rethink all of our involvement with the U.S., and start controlling our own future, because nobody else cares.