By Gemma Q. Casas
Variety News Staff

THE visiting U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources senior staffer in charge of insular issues yesterday said the CNMI immigration federalization bill will not be introduced unless there is bipartisan support, and he expressed hope that the Bush administration will also back the measure.
Allen Stayman, who works for Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. and the chairman of the committee, was here with Josh Johnson, a staffer of the panel’s ranking Republican, Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, and U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs congressional liaison Steve Sander.
“I will attempt to speak for all of us here,” Stayman said. “We will not introduce the bill if we don’t have bipartisan support and the support of the administration. To qualify, I wouldn’t want to do it if we didn’t have that at the minimum,” he said during a press briefing yesterday at the Hyatt Regency Saipan.
Sander said the Bush administration’s full support is not yet apparent, but “it will be there along the way down the road.”
Stayman, Johnson and Sander met yesterday morning with Gov. Benigno R. Fitial, Lt. Gov. Timothy P. Villagomez, key cabinet members and lawmakers.
The governor told them that the federalization move is like taking away the CNMI’s ability to feed itself.
“(Local controls) are the hooks and bait that we need to catch fish. But if the federal government wants to take away the hooks and bait, then we want the federal government to supply the fish,” the governor said in a statement released to the press.
He said the Northern Marianas tourism industry will suffer further if federalization is implemented.
“We don’t want to lose our strategic economic advantages,” Fitial said.
The governor said he asked Sander for the Bush administration’s official position on the federal takeover issue.
The federalization bill is scheduled to be drafted within “weeks,” Stayman earlier said.
But he also said that there is still no definite plan yet on how the federal government will address the immigration issues involving the CNMI’s guest workers.