In an email to Variety, USCIS Regional Media Manager Marie Therese Sebrechts said the team “includes our District Director David Gulick; a community relations officer; a press officer (myself); an officer from the California Service Center division that handles CNMI applications; staff members from USCIS legal counsel and policy who are familiar with the CNMI regulations.”
Team members will be coming from Hawaii, California and Washington, D.C.
Asked about the date of the publication of the final regulations, which were signed by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano yesterday, Sebrechts said: “We cannot predict the exact day…and will only be able to comment on the specifics of the pending regulation once it is published.”
She said as in previous occasions, the USCIS will send out notices to the media and community organizations.
The local office of the USCIS will beef up its staff, she added.
“USCIS is looking into assigning an additional officer to our office there for a few months in the coming fiscal year,” she said.
In a statement, Congressman Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan said the “publication of these regulations will help lift the uncertainty that has been hanging over the heads of businesses and workers in the NMI ever since the governor got the federal court to strike down the original regulations in Nov. 2009.”
He added, “With the regulations now available, businesses will be able to make decisions about how many people to keep employed and whether the time has come to more actively recruit among local workers. And foreign workers will finally gain some certainty about whether they will have jobs here after November.”
At yesterday morning’s teleconference, which included Kelly Ryan, deputy assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, Sablan was told the department planned on sending about a half dozen people to the Northern Marianas in mid-September, once local business people and workers have had a chance to look at the regulations.
“I am assured that Homeland Security will be holding workshops and answering questions on Rota, Tinian, and Saipan over about a two-week period,” said Sablan. “Congressional staff will be working with businesses and all interested parties to make sure that DHS answers all the questions that are sure to arise about how these regulations will work.”
The worker regulations will lay out the process for employers to obtain a special CNMI-only visa for their workers, who do not qualify for any other U.S. visa category. This CNMI-only visa will allow them to continue working in the Northern Marianas, but not in any other part of the U.S. The visa will be available until the end of the immigration transition period, now scheduled for 2014.
Interim regulations were first published on Oct. 27, 2009. But a suit by the Fitial administration forced DHS to retract the regulations a month later. The court did not find any substantive problem with the regulations, but said the public comment process required by law was not followed.
Since the court action, workers and businesses in the Northern Marianas have been left in a state of uncertainty as they speculated what the rules for employment would be after the CNMI-issued umbrella permits that most workers now have expire in Nov. 2011.
