By Haidee V. Eugenio
Variety Assistant Editor

The number of alien workers with U.S. citizen children is now almost 3,000 based on the survey conducted by the Dekada movement, which has been requesting the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to grant permanent residency status to long-term guest workers in the CNMI, especially those who have children born here.
On Tuesday night, Dekada ran out of survey forms to be filled out by nonresidents with U.S. citizen children.
It collected 1,823 survey forms that night, in addition to the 1,076 collected since Sunday.
“We prepared almost 2,000 forms for Tuesday night but they were all gone and there are still over a hundred workers who weren’t able to fill out the forms,” Dekada president Bonifacio Sagana yesterday said in a telephone interview.
Dekada planned to distribute at least 150 more survey forms last night in the lobby of Nauru Building in Susupe.
Sagana, who also has two children born here — a 7-year-old and a 3-year-old — initially expected only 1,500 parents to register their children who were born here.
Data collected from the survey will be sent to U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources staffers Allen Stayman and Josh Johnson by the end of this month. Sagana said Stayman and Johnson, during their recent visit to Saipan, asked them about the number of long-term guest workers with children born here.
Children born in the CNMI, a U.S. insular area, are American citizens.
“I didn’t know there are lots of guest workers with children born here. We earlier thought there’s only going to be about 1,500 because many have left when the garment factories closed. Now we have almost 3,000 parents,” said Sagana, adding that they saw many Korean parents register on Tuesday night.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which held an oversight hearing on the CNMI held in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 8, wants to extend federal immigration to the islands.
Dekada supports the federalization of the CNMI immigration system, which the Fitial administration and the business sector oppose.
The Dekada registration is free of charge to parents with U.S. citizen children. The survey forms ask the name of the mother, father, the length of their stay in the CNMI, the names of their children and their passport numbers.
“We talked about the fact that there are those who have common-law wives here and they have children. Mothers don’t need to write the father’s name or vice versa, just theirs and their children’s names,” said Sagana.
Other nonresident workers interviewed by Variety said they don’t want to register their U.S. citizen children with Dekada. They said if the U.S. Congress wants to grant permanent residency status to long-term foreign workers in the CNMI, it won’t matter whether they answered Dekada survey forms or whether they have children or not.