MARIANAS Variety’s year-end edition in 1973 announced that the NMI population would be “80,000 Within 6 Years,” according to the Marianas Planning Office of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The (Northern) Marianas was among the six TT districts which also included Palau, Ponape (Pohnpei), the Marshalls, Truk (Chuuk) and Yap. The TT was administered by the U.S. “on behalf” of the United Nations.
In 1973, the NMI population was 18,000. The Marianas Planning Office’s population projections were based on the growth of the tourism industry and the opening of a military base on Tinian. “An important part of the projections concerns the need for alien labor,” the MV report stated. “The study points out that with almost any development at all of the tourist industry in the Marianas, there is not sufficient labor to fill the jobs. Under the low level prediction, there would be 2,000 aliens holding presumable permanent jobs. This compares with the nearly 1,000 presently employed, primarily in temporary construction labor. Under the mid level predictions there would be 26,000 aliens residing in the islands and under the high level possibly 50 to 60,000.”
Long story short, the NMI population in 1980 was…over 16,000. The number decreased by over 2,000 compared to the 1973 figure.
As a wise man once said, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
But everyone likes predictions. (Some folks who complain about unscientific online polls find nothing wrong with astrology.)
In June 1991, a news director from the states predicted, in an editorial we published, that “we are going to have violent, serious social problems in 25 years…. [We] are going to have bumper to bumper ‘kids with no land’ and 250,000 aliens living here.”
Twenty-five years later — in 2016 — the NMI’s population was 53,890. With the federalization of local immigration rules, the cap on the number of foreign workers on CW-1 permits was set at 12,999. In Nov. 2021, the CNMI Department of Labor reported “an over 30% drop in the [islands’] foreign workforce from 2020 to 2021…and an over 40% plunge compared to the year 2019.” The number of CW-1 jobs advertised from January 2021 to September 2021 was 10,618, CNMI DOL stated.
Dan Gardner, in his excellent book, “Future Babble,” wrote: “The desire to know the future is universal and constant, as the profusion of soothsaying techniques in human cultures — from goats’ entrails to tea leaves — demonstrates so well. But certain events can sharpen that desire, making it fierce and urgent.” Becoming a parent is one such force, he said. Today, a persistent global pandemic, endless political bickering and economic uncertainty have also triggered “prophecies of disaster and despair.”
According to recorded human history, many if not almost all such predictions were dead wrong. “All those intelligent, informed people [who made those predictions] were wrong,” Gardner noted. “But mostly, the experts were wrong. They’re wrong a lot, those experts. History is littered with their failed predictions.”
Among the most notorious doomsday predictions was the one announced by Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 bestselling book, “The Population Bomb”: hundreds of millions of people starving to death in the 1970s. Like many other “prophetic” experts in the annals of human history, he was wrong.
But many of us will believe the next dire predictions made by experts. Why? The answer, Gardner says, “lies ultimately in our hardwired aversion to uncertainty…. [A]dmitting we don’t know can be profoundly disturbing. So we try to eliminate uncertainty however we can. We see patterns where there are none. We treat random results as if they are meaningful, And we treasure stories that replace the complexity and uncertainty of reality with simple narratives about what’s happening and what will happen…. And thanks to the news media’s preference for the simple and dramatic, the sort of expert we are likely to hear from is confident and conclusive. They know what will happen; they are certain of it. We like that because that is how we want to feel.”
Here then are my fearless predictions for 2022 which is a general election year:
The candidates running for office will tell us that they are for the people; and that they care for retirees, and students, and teachers, and scholarships, and homesteads, and medical referral patients, and veterans, and other government employees, and anyone else who can vote; and they are also against corruption and misspending and wasting public funds; and that they are for the economy, and higher wages, and lower prices, and the environment, and preserving local culture, etc. etc.
I also boldly predict that the candidates for office in the next general election will make the same promises.
Happy New Year!
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