Regurgitating shortsightedness

Over the last 33 years, our men of wisdom have piled debt obligations to the once robust Retirement Fund. Hell, we were happily singing and swinging to the reggae tune, “Don’t worry, be happy….”

The Fund loaned $9 million to the Judiciary to build its facility, took in recipients who never contributed to the Fund; took in 3 percent per year for undeserving legislators; formulated a failed housing program; took in grandchildren of retirees; paid for purposeless trips abroad for Fund board members; paid boilerplate fees of nearly a million to a team of legal eagles; paid heftily to Fund managers who ran away when the ship it’s navigating was ready to turn belly up.

One fine day in recent past we woke up to find the Fund is now on a steady march toward Bankruptcy Cliff. So there’s a dire need to change our tune hoping the problem would disappear. It won’t and any hopeful deferment isn’t going to stop the tsunami of a definite disaster ahead. But it must have been necessary punditry to invoke the habitual passing of the buck to innocent bystanders so the administration could insulate itself from a looming disaster.

Too, it won’t absolve either side of the street deferring to fully scripted concoctions, hoping retirees would acquiesce being victimized by a negligent leadership caught snoozing on the job. Sorry! We’re not ready to join your choir now singing, “Make the world go away”. We’re not as stupid as we look!

Empty politics vs federal law

Had we admitted the irreversible shift in control over immigration, the sorrowful and chaotic mess won’t pile up taller than the Puerto Rico Dump.

But politicians decided to do their one last rain dance raising the hopes of concerned folks that there’s an answer up ahead.

None!

Folks, we’ve lost it under U.S. Pubic Law 110-229. I don’t know what it is in the law that local leadership has difficulty understanding. Definitely, it didn’t leave any room granting the Legislature local statutory dictates. There’s nothing up that alley and not after we’ve had our chance to make a difference we’ve treated with inconsequence. Here now is the trophy of reluctance to acknowledge the effective takeover of immigration by the feds.

We should have been upfront by telling it like it is so affected folks can begin planning their fate as they move on. Here’s what federal immigration says about children born of foreign nationals, be it here or elsewhere in the country:

“The ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ provision must therefore require something in addition to mere birth on U.S. soil. The language of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, from which the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was derived, provides the key to its meaning. The 1866 Act provides: “All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”[3]

More specifically, “As this formulation makes clear, any child born on U.S. soil to parents who were temporary visitors to this country and who, as a result of the foreign citizenship of the child’s parents, remained a citizen or subject of the parents’ home country was not entitled to claim the birthright citizenship provided by the 1866 Act.”

It would have done everyone a whale of good had we reviewed and understood the historical intent of the 14th Amendment from the beginning. Therein lies the genesis of an amendment we’ve ignored all along. The only way out is the traditional approach is by applying in regional centers of USCIS or embassies for U.S. citizenship. There’s no solid answer from our half-cocked policy-makers.

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It is also well and good to take a retreat to study our cards in our relationship with our benefactors in D.C. Washington has the purse, the power and definitely the upper hand. It’s foolhardy to even think for a moment that we could wage a David and Goliath war against Uncle Sam. We’d all be singing White Christmas year-round when everything around us is parched brown.

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The labor requirement of the NMI can no longer be left to languish in ad hoc policy decisions. U.S. Department of Interior’s OIA is preparing a study that includes human resource development. It pays to proactively partake in this venture to really work under an organized plan to meet current and future labor requirements here. For instance, it requires defining the future of these isles.

We can’t lamely and blindly declare that hi-tech industry is the next best venture. That would be a fallacy. Step back and look at our basic infrastructure, specifically the syllabus of our educational institutions. Is it relevant to support the decision to embrace a hi-tech industry? Are we producing sufficient engineers annually to support it? This is why we must learn to plan seriously. Ad hoc planning must go! Have a good one this weekend. Si JR.

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[I] Delrosario is a regular contributor to the [/I]Saipan Tribune’[I]s Opinion Section[/I]