In her latest interim report to the Legislature, Kaipat said the Labor Department’s data is not “population data,” thus, cannot be used for population purposes.
She made the statement amid seemingly conflicting figures about the number of documented migrant workers in the CNMI released to the public.
“When the department published a transaction number [for example, 30,000 permits issued], the newspapers would report there were 30,000 foreign workers. The published data never was people data. It was always transaction data,” she said.
“However, in prior years, the transactions tended to be simpler and fewer. For that reason, the transaction data—while incorrect as a proxy for the number of people—was probably not incorrect by a very large margin,” she added.
Last year, the Labor Department issued emergency regulations capping the number of alien workers at 22,417.
Only replacements for the slots of foreign workers who had left the islands were processed, subject to certain exemptions.
Kaipat said when the federalization law placed a cap on the number of aliens her office “did a lot of one-time hand work and mathematical estimating to come up with a number.”
That number, however was not a “count” of the number of aliens but it was an estimate, she added.
“It was not an estimate of foreign workers; it included all aliens in all immigration categories who are allowed to work (diplomats, journalists, foreign investors, immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, and so on),” she said.
She noted that the U.S. wants to ensure that only a reasonable number of foreign workers that can be admitted to work in the commonwealth.
