“I just want to stay here and work and not fear to be forced to go home because I have no legal status to stay. I’ve spent more than half of my life in the CNMI,” he told the Variety.
He used to have his own auto shop, but the new rules now require him to post a bond of $100,000.
If his status is improved, Lanuza said he and other long-term guest workers could become entrepreneurs themselves.
Ed Pelagio, 55, also seeks job security.
He arrived here in 1987 from the Philippines to work as a maintenance worker for Marianas Printing.
Now a carpenter, Pelagio said Saipan has been good to his family, enabling him to send his four boys to school.
Leo Frial, another long-term guest worker, said he hopes the U.S. Congress would be moved by the stories of guest workers who have toiled in the CNMI for many years without any job security.
He said he holds an umbrella permit but is uncertain what will happen after it expires on Nov. 27, 2011.
A construction worker, Frial said he needs his job to support his two sons’ college education.
A mother from Shanghai, China, who only wants to be known as Pao, said an improved immigration status would allow her to be with her 12-year-old daughter.
Her child was born here and speaks fluent English. She is having difficulty speaking and reading in Mandarin.
Pao said if they go back to China, there are uncertainties to be faced.
She too hopes Congress would positively act on Interior’s recommendations.
Lisa, a former garment worker from China who is now married to an American citizen, said she’s happy about Interior’s recommendations.
“It’s about time,” she said.
Mollah Masirul was a student in Dhaka, Bangladesh before he came to Saipan in 1995 to work as a security guard.
Masirul said his former employer, Commonwealth Security Services, did not pay him and more than a dozen other Bangladeshis, forcing them to file a case with the CNMI Department of Labor.
They won the case and were awarded damages for their unpaid wages. But to this day, he said he hasn’t seen a penny of it.
Masirul said improved immigration status would protect people from exploitation.
He also worked for L&T International, which used to be the island’s biggest garment manufacturer.
He worked as maintenance worker for L&T for 10 years or until it was forced to close its factories following the liberalization of trade rules in 2005.
He said he found another job at a recycling center but his employer later abandoned him and his co-workers.
A devout Muslim, Masirul said losing a job is the most difficult experience especially for a nonresident.
He said their family pawned their lands so he could raise the $4,000 placement fee to work here. He also has to support his wife and their child.
Hafijul Islam, another Bangladeshi, said improved status would allow nonresidents to improve their lives elsewhere in the U.S.
Human rights advocate Wendy Doromal, a former Rota teacher, said in her blog “Unheard No More” it is “undemocratic, un-American and immoral to deny status that allows for a direct pathway to citizenship to a group of people who have built the islands, renewed year after year because their skills were needed, and for many, have lived and worked in the CNMI longer than in their home countries.”
(Tomorrow: The locals’ reaction)
