What kind of a recovery he has in mind? The “better times” of the past?
But the CNMI never enjoyed sustainable economic growth. Its initial boom years were fueled by a one-time bonanza: the influx of Japanese investors in the late 1980s and the millions of dollars that poured into land leases. The CNMI has nothing to show for that “growth,” except for a government that went ape in creating non-essential jobs for political supporters and costly entitlements for voters that included saddling the Retirement Fund with unfunded liabilities. It was like Christmas everyday. It is never Christmas every day.
Then came the second “boom” period — the mid- to late-1990s — after the CNMI government opened the floodgates for more garment factories which promptly brought in 15,000 guest workers to a small island whose local population was already outnumbered by nonresidents. The factories liked it here. They were exempted from the business gross revenue tax. More important, they could hire cheap alien labor and export, duty free, their “Made in the USA” apparel to the U.S. where their only competition were American manufacturers who had to pay their workers higher wages.
Everyone in the CNMI knew back then that this profitable — for the Saipan factories — arrangement would end in 2005 with the liberalization of international trade rules. One of the main arguments of the garmentistas was that the CNMI should “take advantage” of hosting the factories while trying to bring in new industries in preparation for the garment exit.
But the garment factories cost the CNMI more than their contributions to the local coffers. The industry employed thousands of guest workers, straining the commonwealth’s infrastructure, public services and environment. Puerto Rico dump had to be shut down. A new landfill had to be built. Sewers in San Antonio were perennially clogged. The beach water was polluted.
The garment factories presence, moreover, provided another excuse for elected officials to further expand local government bureaucracy, freeze the local minimum wage and hire, for $10 million, a lobbyist whose temporary success in fending off federalization only ensured its eventual implementation — as this newspaper, the “Federal Variety,” repeatedly warned a decade ago.
It was the garment industry that spawned numerous labor, human rights and immigration abuses so notorious that Saipan is still known as the island of sweatshops and slaves. Even at its death throes, this industry continues to create problems for the CNMI. Its displaced workers have either turned into prostitution and other crimes or filed dozens of labor cases just to prolong their stay here.
All this for…what? The user fees that had to finance the costs of hosting these factories?
If the garment industry was so good to the CNMI then why are we in this mess that keeps getting messier? Where is the progress that was supposed to happen? And now that the manufacturers and their workers are either gone or going, who do you think we’ll be left behind to pick up the pieces?
So now the governor, a former garment executive, is suing the feds so that the CNMI can have more of the same “economic progress” that is as fleeting and illusory as his campaign promises. He claims that he filed the lawsuit for the sake of the local people. But the local don’t want to see more of the same. They have never liked their third world economy created on the backs of foreigners who are willing to take low paying jobs while residing here forever and giving birth to U.S. citizen children. The local people also know that their government cannot continue expanding to accommodate the growing population of voters who expect and demand to get the same cushy jobs, handouts and benefits enjoyed by their parents and grandparents in the 1980s and 1990s. This could only “work” in the past when the local population was still small and the economy was still showing some life.
There is, in short, no constituency out there for the status quo. Most locals will not be weeping as guest workers pack up and leave. I know a lot of locals who yearn for the simpler and more quiet pre-commonwealth days. Back then they had trade skills, they fish, they farm or worked for a small government that was paying just enough.
What do they care if this lousy economy finally collapses? They will still have their islands. And they’re still citizens of the greatest and richest nation in the world. What they won’t have is what they never liked anyway. The only locals unhappy about federalization are the CNMI Immigration personnel who are disappointed with the feds’ strict hiring policies.
But what about the guest workers, you ask. We’ll, we’re guests. We’re here because we’re needed. And once we’re no longer wanted then, of course, we will say adios and say hello to, let me see, Palau, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Nigeria…
I heard that jobs in Baghdad pay really well.
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