For each quarter, approximately 4,000 to 5,000 permits are reviewed to determine if they have expired and whether the holder of the expired permit continues to stay in the commonwealth, she said in a report to the Legislature.
The department has set a cap of over 22,000 for the CNMI’s foreign workforce.
Kaipat said the methodology for their quarterly review was completed in Sept. 2007, after the upgrade of the Labor Information Data System.
“Processing labor application was up and running and the identification of overstayers under this new system began in the first quarter of 2008,” she added.
The department, she said, is expecting to meet its performance benchmark for the quarterly list in 2009.
In 2003, the department said it issued 29,380 work permits; in 2004, 36,405; in 2005, 33,292; in 2006, 27,506; and in 2007, 17,120.
Kaipat said all overstaying foreign worker who arrived in the CNMI from 2003 to 2007 have been identified, and a list of overstayers for each year have been published, examined and submitted for certification by the Immigration Division.
The department reported 26,039 work permit holders in 1996; 36,566 in 1997; 26,411 in 1998; 31,905 in 1999; 38,520 in 2000; 30,957 in 2001; and 29,455 in 2002.
However, Kaipat said the data collected during this period were not as consistent or reliable as the post-2002 data and required more work to cross-check.
She said these data had been converted to Microsoft Access 97 and then to MS SQL 7.0 for archiving purposes.
“There are large numbers of records for which the date must be qualified checked and any gaps in the date must be identified,” her report stated. “It is possible to deal with data gaps by working with prior and subsequent year records, but this is a time-consuming task.”
There are no available records of work permit holders from 1985 to 1988 but in 1989, 18,411 were issued working permit; 21,857 in 1990; 25,143 in 1991; 23,029 in 1992; 22,766 in 1993; 22,560 in 1994; and 24,301 in 1995.
