US Senate adds CNMI immigration to energy bill

With only a few congressional session days left before 2014 ends, the U.S. Senate added Thursday night three CNMI immigration policies to an insular areas energy bill then passed the combined bill and sent it back to the U.S. House of Representatives. These immigration policies include extending beyond Dec. 31, 2014 the CNMI’s exemption from accepting asylum applicants, extending the islands’ E2-C investor visa, and extending the numerical cap on H visas for Guam and the CNMI.

But there is no telling when the U.S. House will act on the Senate-amended bill, with the U.S. House in recess for district work this week.

Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP) called the Senate’s move among a flurry of “last-minute actions” on Thursday night.

“The extension would keep the policies in place until the end of 2019,” Sablan said.

The U.S. Senate added the CNMI’s three immigration policies to Delegate Donna Christensen’s (D-Virgin Islands) H.R. 83, which passed the U.S. House early last week.

H.R. 83 requires the U.S. Interior secretary to put together energy teams that would work with American Samoa, the CNMI, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Freely Associated States on lowering the cost of electricity.

At present, residential customers in the CNMI pay 40 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is three times the U.S. average.

The bill will help local governments develop and implement plans to reduce reliance on the imported fossil fuels that make electricity so expensive in America’s insular areas.

“Getting legislation enacted is not easy and can require pursuing many different paths at the same time,” Sablan said.

Both the CNMI immigration policies and the insular energy provisions of H.R. 83 are also parts of Sablan’s omnibus territories bill or H.R. 2200, and its Senate companion, S.1237, which passed the Senate on June 18.

The CNMI immigration policies are also included in Sablan’s H.R. 4296, which was ordered reported by the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee on May 29.

Gov. Eloy S. Inos has also asked U.S. House Speaker John Boehner in a July letter to prioritize and pass H.R. 4296.

If none of these bills dealing with CNMI immigration policies pass Congress and are signed into law by Dec. 31, 2014, the CNMI will have to start, among other things, accepting asylum applications in 2015, which officials and businesses said would hurt the still fragile tourism industry and could catch China’s ire.

This also means foreign investors with E2-C visas will have to either convert to another U.S. investor status or close shop. Besides the decrease in economic activities, hundreds of jobs are also expected to be lost when this happens.

Sablan, like U.S. House Natural Resources Committee chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wa), has been “cautiously optimistic” about the passage of any of these bills on CNMI immigration policies.

But last year, even with limited session days, a bill that would delay anew a 50-cent minimum wage increase in the CNMI for 2013 passed the U.S. House. Sablan earlier said the same effort would be exerted this year for bills with CNMI immigration policies.

Mineral revenues

In other news, the U.S. House passed last week H.R. 2, which would permit offshore mineral and energy development in the exclusive economic zone around the CNMI and revenue-sharing for the Commonwealth government.

Sablan said H.R. 2, which defines the CNMI as a coastal state under the Outer Continental Shelf Act, is “a next step in expanding our rights in the waters around our islands.”

The first step was gaining ownership of near-shore lands and waters with the enactment of Public Law 113-34 exactly a year ago last week.

But at present, there is no legal means to lease areas beyond that and into the exclusive economic zone for mineral and energy exploration and development.

H.R.2, which now goes to the Senate, gives authority to Interior secretary to enter into leases, subject to strict environmental requirements, and to share the revenues with any nearby insular area.

This is a similar arrangement as for coastal states, such as California and Louisiana, Sablan said.