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‘Status proposal won’t prevent federalization’
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Posted on Apr 08 2008
A staffer at the U.S. Senate says there is no stopping the passage of legislation that will place the Northern Marianas under federal immigration control.
Bill Wicker, communications director of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said that not even a local proposal to grant permanent immigration status to long-time guest workers would make the senators change their minds.
“No, not at this point,” Wicker said, when asked if the proposal, now circulating informally in the Commonwealth, might cause Congress to reconsider its imminent approval of the federal immigration bill.
“The U.S. Senate is poised to pass S. 2739 (which contains the CNMI measure), and that could happen as early as this week,” Wicker said in an e-mail to the Saipan Tribune.
Wicker reiterated the Senate committee’s position that the proposed immigration reform, once enacted, “will provide a foundation for the CNMI’s economic future by creating stable and sustainable labor and immigration laws.”
Further, he pointed out that the CNMI immigration has taken no formal action on the worker status legislation.
The House-approved bill imposing federal immigration policy on the Northern Marianas awaits Senate action as part of a new consolidated bill, S. 2739, introduced in the Senate last month.
The Senate is expected to take action on the bill this week. If it passes the Senate, it immediately goes to President Bush for his signature.
The Fitial administration has lobbied the committee to remove the provision relating to the federalization of local immigration from the omnibus bill, arguing that this should be treated as a separate bill.
Gov. Benigno R. Fitial has said that lumping the CNMI federalization bill with other bills and dubbing them “non-controversial” is unfair to the CNMI because it considers the federal takeover a controversial measure that should be debated separately.
