“That needs to stop,” he added.
He said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is now processing CW applications, is not necessarily negligent about this issue.
Businesses, Sablan added, “will need to start investing in U.S. eligible workers.”
No one could tell right now how 2015 is going to look in the CNMI, he said, because “eventually CW-1 workers will be zeroed out.
CW visas are only good until 2014.
This is the best time to get more U.S. workers “on board,” Sablan said.
“Start training them because in the long-term these are the workers we are going to have for CNMI businesses,” he added.
A local waitress in a Garapan restaurant told Variety that she originally applied at one of the hotels but she was told she lacked experience.
Sablan said when a U.S. worker applies for the job of bush-cutter, for example, he does not need five years of experience.
Sablan said there is a business establishment on island that sells products he loves, but he refuses to spend a dime there because it has not been hiring U.S. workers for positions that are now available.
He declined to identify this establishment.
“If they want to invest in the future of their businesses then they should invest in U.S. eligible workers because eventually we will have no eligible [foreign] workers [soon],” he said.
Sablan at the same time said he does not expect USCIS to approve 22,000 CW visas in light of the declining local economy.
“That is something that I need to discuss further with the Department of Homeland Security. Because [the number of foreign workers] needs to zero out gradually. Our understanding is that there may be a continuous need for some foreign workers but obviously we also need to start encouraging the employment of U.S eligible workers here,” he said.
