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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, not at this point,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe U.S. Senate is poised to pass S. 2739 (which contains the CNMI measure), and that could happen as early as this week,\u201d Wicker said in an e-mail to the Saipan Tribune.<\/p>\n
Wicker reiterated the Senate committee\u2019s position that the proposed immigration reform, once enacted, \u201cwill provide a foundation for the CNMI\u2019s economic future by creating stable and sustainable labor and immigration laws.\u201d<\/p>\n
Further, he pointed out that the CNMI immigration has taken no formal action on the worker status legislation.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Gov. Benigno R. Fitial has said that lumping the CNMI federalization bill with other bills and dubbing them \u201cnon-controversial\u201d is unfair to the CNMI because it considers the federal takeover a controversial measure that should be debated separately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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