I Love Saipan frets about future

A store that has become known as the go-to place for souvenirs is facing an uncertain future following U.S. Citizenship Immigration Services’ announcement that it would be cutting 3,000 worker slots from the foreign worker program.

That reduction would have a very negative impact on the operations of I Love Saipan, according to company president Alex Youn, who said that 26 percent of their workers are holders of visas under the CNMI-Only Transitional Worker program. Those visas are also called CW-1 permits.

“I was expecting the reduction because that is the law but the enormous number of reduction…was a surprise,” he said.

Youn said many of these CW workers have visas that expired last November or are expiring this December.

“USCIS was not processing our papers because the CW cap was still unknown at the time of our renewal. Now that the reduction is out, they will start processing and I’m not sure if we are going to get into that new cap,” he said. “I’m worried because of the uncertainty and these workers hold valuable positions in the company.”

Many of the CW-1 visa holders employed at I Love Saipan’s seven stores are language skilled workers and are employed as sales associates and cashiers.

“It’s going to be hard to find language skilled workers immediately to try to do sales. We rely on them to provide personal service to our customers and that is one of the things that our customers like about the stores—that there is someone here who can talk to them and help them pick out items they need,” Youn said.

“When a customer wants to know more about a product, for example our vitamins, our language skilled workers make them understand what it is good for. Our sales activities rely on our language skilled workers. If we don’t have them, customers would just come in and rely on their own,” he added.

Hundreds of customers from China, Korea, and Japan go to their stores everyday and Youn said the language skilled workers are proficient in these languages.

“Without our language skilled workers, we [may have to] change sales strategy and rely on ‘self explanatory’ [techniques in explaining] the products or items in the store. …I expect our gross sales to drop if we don’t have the [language] skilled workers. If our gross sales will drop, it will affect operations and eventually profit,” he added.

Youn said they have been hiring U.S. citizens—jobs in the company are always available—but the lack of skill has always been an issue.

“The CNMI is a tourism-driven economy. There are many opportunities, especially if you are multilingual but we don’t have a good language program to fill in these positions. For construction, we have [the Northern Marianas Technical Institute] doing its part, but in the other parts of the tourism industry, it’s tough. Language courses in schools will be a good investment for the government since we expect that there will be zero foreign workers come 2019,” he said.

According to Youn, he supports the importance the administration of Gov. Ralph DLG Torres in giving to foreign workers.

“I’m glad that the governor has a different position on how his administration looks at CWs than past governments. I know it’s already done but if only the past governments have the same vision when the law was drafted in 2008, then we would not have this serious problem right now,” he said.

Youn hopes that CW workers who have been working in the CNMI for over 10 years and those who have U.S. citizen children would be granted some type of visa that would at least give them CNMI residency and be allowed to work without having to worry about renewing visas every year.