How One U.S. Territory Handles Immigration Law

Haidee Eugenio has worked legally on U.S. soil for more than 10 years, yet she is not a citizen of the United States, and she does not have a green card. In fact, she had to obtain a visa for her first trip to California last year.

Immigration reform has been an issue brewing in the United States for years, but with Gov. Jan Brewer (R-Ariz.) recently signing into law the controversial SB 1070, a law that mandated local enforcement of federal immigration law based on the appearance of the suspect, the debate about undocumented immigrants has been brought to the forefront. Most Americans, when discussing immigration today, picture a citizen of Mexico or a Central American county illegally crossing the border into the United States.

Eugenio’s story, however, contradicts that. In fact, her immigration story is one that very few Americans realize is out there. Eugenio, who is originally from the Philippines, is one of 20,000 non-resident workers legally earning a living in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas (CNMI), a U.S. territory in the far Western Pacific with a population of about 60,000.

Located 6,000 miles west of the U.S. mainland, the CNMI is a chain of 15 islands, three of which—Rota, Tinian and the capital, Saipan—are regularly inhabited. In the 1990s, the CNMI began bringing in foreign workers, mostly from the Philippines, China, and other Southeast Asian countries, to work for far less than the minimum wage at garment factories where several clothing companies like Levi Strauss & Co. and Abercrombie and Fitch opened up factories so they could put “Made in the U.S.A.” on their labels. Foreign nationals also workedat hotels and restaurants. But with the influx of foreign workers came human smuggling and trafficking, prostitution, and other human rights violations.

In 2008, Congress extended federal labor and immigration laws to the CNMI, meaning the local government would no longer be able to set and enforce their own policies and standards regarding foreign workers. Under the law, the U.S. Department of Interior was tasked with recommending to Congress what should occur to the 20,000 non-resident workers legally residing in the CNMI now that U.S. laws apply. The Interior recently released their report [PDF], which said that, “consistent with the goals of comprehensive immigration reform,” Congress should consider permitting the more than 15,000 alien workers lawfully residing in the CNMI for more than five years the chance to apply for long-term status under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The implementation of this policy could come in many forms, including: Congress conferring U.S. citizenship to the alien workers; alien workers conferred a permanent resident status leading to U.S. citizenship with the five-year minimum residence spent anywhere in the United States or its territories; and alien workers conferred a permanent resident status leading to U.S. citizenship with the five-year minimum residence spent in the CNMI. In the report, the Interior Department noted that precedent for granting long-term status to non-immigrants was established in 1982’s Public Law 97-271, or the Virgin Islands Nonimmigrant Alien Adjustment Act of 1981, which allowed more than 20,000 legal workers who had been residing in the U.S. Virgin Islands for at least seven years at the time to apply for U.S. permanent residence.

But as with immigration here on the mainland, there is not a simple solution to make everyone happy. Both CNMI’s local administration under Gov. Benigno Fitial and the territory’s legislature oppose the Interior report’s recommendations. The bicameral legislature passed a joint resolution opposing the measures proposed in the Interior report. Fitial said the Department of the Interior did not consult with the local government and administration before submitting the report to Congress, and said the U.S. government should not give preferential treatment to the 20,000 foreign workers.

Fitial, according to The Saipan Tribune, one of the newspapers in the CNMI, believes the guest workers should continue to come to the CNMI under a guest worker employment contract and that once locals are qualified to do their job, the foreign workers should go home and not seek permanent residency status or U.S. citizenship. Many locals in the CNMI—the indigenous Chamorros and Carolinians populations—believe that by granting citizenship to the non-resident workers, the locals will become marginalized and even more of a minority in their own land. What is noteworthy, however, is that in 1986 when the Covenant Act, or the law that officially defined the relationship between the United States and the CNMI, into effect, most residents of the islands—the Chamorros and Carolinians—were granted instant U.S. citizenship. Citizens can travel within the United States without a passport but aren’t able to vote in presidential elections.

For his part, Rep. Gregorio “Kilili” Sablan (D), the CNMI’s non-voting representative in U.S. Congress, wrote a letter to the islands’ locals reminding them that Congress will not act swiftly on this matter and the recommendations are just that: recommendations.

“The Executive Branch has lots of ideas about what Congress should do,” Sablan wrote in his letter. “But Congress has a mind of its own. Congress may never seriously consider any of the five options in the Interior report—certainly not the proposal for instant citizenship. But one thing is certain: eventually Congress will take up legislation to set a new national immigration policy. If the Northern Marianas is locked into that comprehensive immigration reform, then we are less likely to get a solution that fits our special needs.”

Kristi Eaton is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She graduated from Arizone State University in 2008.

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