The 96-page report of Malcolm D. McPhee & Associates and Dick Conway was financed by a $75,000 grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., who chairs the Senate committee and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told McPhee to submit additional data and explanation about his economic report to the committee by Jan. 15, 2009.
The U.S. Department of Justice has asked the federal court to dismiss the governor’s lawsuit, describing it as based on “speculative and hypothetical” arguments.
Questions
In their joint letter to McPhee, the senators asked him if he knew that his economic report would be used in the lawsuit against the CNMI federalization law.
“Were any CNMI officials or representatives given a draft copy of this report before the final copy was released to the public? If so, were any changes made as a result of comments, corrections, or criticisms made by CNMI officials or representatives? If so, what were the changes?” the senators asked.
According to the report, the federalization of local immigration “could prove troublesome for the visitor industry, now the CNMI’s only driving force in the economy, because about 70 percent of its workers are non-U.S. citizens. The outlook for the CNMI economy is bleak.”
Bingaman and Murkowski specifically wanted to find out the methodology used in the economic report.
They also questioned the source of the CNMI population cited in the economic report which pegged it at 60,400.
The last U.S. Census on the islands was completed in 2000 when the population was over 69,000.
Bingaman and Murkowski also asked McPhee to “please provide an estimated number of [Freely Associated State] citizens currently employed in the CNMI and an estimate of those potentially available from the FAS as workers in the CNMI.”
The senators questioned the report’s conclusion that all foreign workers will be sent home to their countries of origin by 2014, which is the same argument made by the Fitial administration.
“This report is presented as an economic study but this non-economic assumption effectively undermines its conclusions. Please identify the political expert(s) who were consulted in reaching this assumption and detail their basis for making it,” the senators said.
