Torres administration, Kilili give assurances to address CW issue

Looking to help address the ongoing contract worker crisis, government officials offered assurances on their efforts to solve the issue but have not yet made public the details to these plans.

The administration of Gov. Ralph DLG Torres disclosed Friday that they are looking at options to address the “administration of the contract worker program” and to “seek options to incorporate” these into forthcoming 902 talks “in the next week or so” that will address the concerns with the renewals of contract worker employees in coming months that would otherwise be rejected by the federal government.

“We are working along with Congressman Gregorio Kilili Sablan and will incorporate this experience” into the 902 consultations with the White House “in the next couple of weeks,” said the Torres administration, in a statement, when sought for comment by the Saipan Tribune.

Officials have been researching federal administrative procedure to see what they can request from federal immigration officials, or the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which two weeks ago had announced they had received a number of contract worker applicants to meet their cap of 12,999 workers allowed to work in the CNMI this year.

Delegate Sablan, for his part, in his newsletter on Saturday and on his Facebook page, said that “Commonwealth officials, stakeholders, and I have been working toward agreement on a long-term solution for immigration.”

Sablan noted that USCIS has announced they are near the limit of 12,999 CW permits for foreign workers and no more applications will be accepted for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2016. And that employers who submitted applications 180 days in advance, as USCIS advises, are not affected.

“An unknown number of workers with permits expiring before Sept. 30 could have to leave, however,” he said. “A likely cause of the CW shortage is the use of the permits for construction workers, who could be eligible for the unlimited H-2B visa. The Commonwealth government estimates as many as 3,400 CW permits could be converted to H-2Bs.”

“This is the first time the CW cap has been reached and there is no easy fix. I traveled to California in January to get things moving, when CW applications backlogged at the processing center there; and I will do everything now to get us through this current crisis and eventually reach a permanent solution,” Sablan said in his newsletter Saturday.