30 days should mean 30 days
THE local business community, through the Saipan Chamber of Commerce, has been expressing concern about the “touchback” provision since it was proposed as part of a bipartisan CW extension bill passed by a Republican-led U.S. Congress and signed into law by a Republican president in July 2018. We should also remind ourselves that it took USCIS almost two years before it could announce the interim final rule for the law’s implementation.
In June 2020, the authors of the CW law informed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that CNMI businesses were supposed “to have flexibility when to send CW-1 workers home for a 30-day ‘touchback.’ ” The authors “wanted their intention to be well understood that touchback could occur at any time before submission of an application for a fourth year ‘to fit the touchback period into the business cycle in a manner that best meets their human resource needs.’ ”
Three years ago, the then-chairman of the CNMI House Committee on Federal and Foreign Affairs urged DHS to “implement the temporary departure (touchback) requirement…in a manner that would impose least harm to the Commonwealth economy, consistent with [U.S.] congressional intent.” He said requiring CWs to “exit…for 30 days after their permits have expired and before their employers may petition for a third renewal, would result in a mass departure of the Commonwealth’s workforce all at the same time, causing significant disruption to the Commonwealth’s economy. We note that the local economy is especially fragile at this time, still in recovery after three major typhoon disasters impacting the islands in 2015 and 2018, and now in the midst of the Covid-19 global pandemic and a severe economic crisis.” Like the CW law’s authors, the committee chairman “respectfully” requested DHS to provide CNMI employers with flexibility in complying with the touchback rule.
What could be more reasonable?
The CNMI’s worsening worker shortage could have been prevented if only the federal government would follow its own rule, which provides for a “30-day exit.” In reality, the exit period can take up to seven months. And what will happen, meanwhile, to the businesses that employ the affected CWs, who were hired through the mandated federal process precisely because there were not enough eligible U.S. workers?
And we’re not talking about generic “workers,” but specific workers for specific jobs, usually the same jobs for which there is also shortage on Guam and the states, which pay higher wages and provide more benefits, and a wide array of training/apprenticeship programs.
What will happen to the CNMI’s ongoing construction projects, including those critical to the tourism industry, the school system, the college? What about the healthcare workers and caregivers that look after local patients, including the elderly and the children? Or the maintenance, tradespersons and other service workers essential to the operation of hotels and other tourism-related businesses?
And what would be the impact on the CNMI government’s revenue base?
We’ll say it again
EVERYTHING in the economy is interconnected. The job positions in the private that will be vacated and left unfilled because of the touchback provision will directly affect the employment of U.S. workers in the private and public sectors — as well as the CNMI government’s ability to pay its obligations to its employees, retirees and the other beneficiaries of its so many generous programs, including medical referral patients.
And yet the administration and some lawmakers are already counting the unhatched chicks of a tax-hike measure they want to impose on a prostrate economy. It seems that no one wants to openly talk about the ongoing business closures, the number of local residents and CWs leaving the islands each week, and what a shrinking population and workforce could mean for the government’s revenue projections.
Can the CNMI government still afford to pay the retirees’ 25% benefit? What about the government employees’ work-hours? Should they be reduced further? What about scholarships and medical referrals?
These and related topics should be discussed publicly by lawmakers as they deliberate on the FY 2024 budget.
For their part, the local business community should continue working with CNMI officials in reaching out to the decision-makers in the nation’s capital who created this worker shortage.
