DC committee staff meet with SEDC

Tan Holdings vice president Alex Sablan discussed with Saipan Tribune the purpose of a meeting with visiting congressional delegation staffers of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee held last week at the Francisco C. Ada-Saipan International Airport.

Sablan described the meeting as lasting about an hour and 20 minutes.

“Basically we spent the time giving them a rundown of what’s happening on the ground here with respect to the economy overall, gave them an historical perspective of where we were, with the apparel industry, as far back as the apparel industry, what happened, that timeline and its demise and what occurred after its demise.”

The discussion of the timeline led to the current contract worker cap crisis, as the Commonwealth continues to see an exodus of CW-1 workers whose visas expired in the last few months.

Sablan says the focus at this point is to get the increase in the CW-1 cap as quickly as possible in an attempt to diffuse the situation of losing about 3,400 contract workers by the end of the year. “If we could get it to 18,000 and a recognition for 2017 that we have this new quota, then hopefully we could get deferment for these individuals, keep them here on the ground.”

Last July, Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP) introduced H.R. 5888 aiming to extend the contract worker phase out deadline and increase the cap. The bill includes a request to extend the federally mandated immigration phase out deadline from 2019 to 2029. The legislation does increase the cap to 18,000 contract workers from the current numerical limit of 12,999. H.R. 5888 also calls for foreign workers to be paid the prevailing wage, a little higher than the minimum wage in the CNMI.

“We laid out the current crisis of losing roughly 1,300 workers in this fiscal year and what is going to be about 3,400 of operational people when the dust settles at the end of the year because 7,000 construction workers are replacing these individuals in the quota cap,” Sablan said, referring to the airport meeting last week.

Delegate Sablan’s office said Congressional staffers Marc Alberts, Brian Modeste, and Matt Strickler “responded positively to our request and were able to spend over an hour of their short time on Saipan listening to the representatives of leading business groups.”

Members of the CNMI Strategic Economic Development Council include representatives from the Saipan Chamber of Commerce, Society of Human Resource Management, and Hotel Association of the Northern Mariana Islands.

In responding to an inquiry about the status of an administrative fix or a short term solution to the contract worker cap crisis, Sablan tells Saipan Tribune, “There’s really no hope for any major administrative fix that could defer the impacted without a quota increase, so at this stage the only solution is to get the quota increase and try to save a bunch of these jobs from leaving the Commonwealth.”

Delegate Sablan has been talking with Rob Bishop, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, about scheduling an oversight hearing “on recent developments in the Marianas economy and how federal policy affects our ability to grow,” according to Delegate Sablan’s office. Delegate Sablan is also asking Bishop to travel to the CNMI.

Alex Sablan says while a date has not been confirmed for the hearing, a group will be invited to speak in Washington, D.C. sometime within the next month. The SEDC member says those invited will speak both for and against the legislation.

Sablan also says the SEDC members and congressional delegation staffers discussed the issues surrounding both the minimum wage and prevailing wage for professional positions in the Commonwealth. He told Saipan Tribune it’s important to have a billboard of competition for jobs so those considering coming back home to the Commonwealth “can utilize this as a benchmark to what they perceive as an opportunity to returning.”

On May 20, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced they reached the CW-1 cap through petitions received up until May 5. Business leaders determined there are about 1,300 foreign workers whose status expires between May 5 and Oct. 1 this year. This data does not include family members, according to a joint resolution released by the groups in June.