Bridge to nowhere?

Bridge Investment Group LLC seems to have made a bad bet on its Tinian casino plan. Then again, it appears they were betting against the house-- PL 110-229.

The immigration provisions of that law called for federal restrictions on alien hiring and investment that are much stricter than the CNMI laws and regulations they replaced.

According to the Saipan Tribune two-thirds of BIG's planned units were condominiums. Chinese investors were prominent in previous stories about their plans.

From the comments of spokesman Phillip Mendiola-Long, it would appear the company is hoping that the Department of Homeland Security will include Chinese workers when it issues its 'CW' rules and also issue investment rules with "lowered thresholds".

Neither seems likely. As Mendiola-Long points out, Chinese nationals are not eligible for the H-2 visa program. This year's list of eligible countries* has just been issued. The factors used in designating countries include:

(1) The country's cooperation with respect to issuance of travel documents for citizens, subjects, nationals and residents of that country who are subject to a final order of removal; (2) the number of final and unexecuted orders of removal against citizens, subjects, nationals and residents of that country; (3) the number of orders of removal executed against citizens, subjects, nationals and residents of that country; and (4) such other factors as may serve the U.S. interest.

It seems likely the same factors would apply to 'CW' workers and investors, and 22 reminders are currently awaiting trial for allegedly trying to enter Guam illegally from the CNMI. In addition, only the employment rules were re-opened for further comment, the investment rules are final.

* Argentina, Australia, Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, The Netherlands, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay.

Chamorro Savings Time*

I really wasn't going to write about the lawsuit. (Saipan Tribune and Marianas Variety) The Department of Homeland Security still takes over 'after midnight' tonight. Most of the contract workers will still have to be gone in five years. So, what's changed by District Court Judge Paul Friedman's preliminary injunction?

There are no interim rules. We just get the full U.S. immigration package. The CNMI argued, persuasively to me, that DHS didn't follow the Administrative Procedures Act. Okay, the judge said, follow them: propose regulations, give an adequate comment period, consider the comments and then promulgate final rules.

It's like Daylight Savings Time: we can push time back, but only for a few months.

"The commonwealth will continue to operate under its existing labor system except for entry and exit," volunteered part-time attorney Deanne Siemer. Umm. No. We just won't have interim rules to soften the transition yet.

In one of this lawsuit's strange twists, Friedman writes that "The CNMI maintains that the Commonwealth’s guest worker population currently is experiencing high rates of unemployment, and that employers are consequently unlikely to require permits for new guest workers in the near future. Reply at 20-21. Consequently, the United States cannot argue with any degree of certainty that CNMI employers will be harmed by the issuance of a preliminary injunction in this matter."

Got that? Everybody's in limbo. If there are problems, Friedman writes, "To assist either foreign workers seeking to leave and return to the CNMI or employers desperately in need of workers from outside the Commonwealth, DHS may, if necessary, promulgate a narrowly focused and temporary emergency regulation that addresses only the problem at hand."

That's a far cry from Siemer's formulation that "Friedman also virtually commanded DHS to come up with an emergency regulation allowing aliens in the commonwealth to travel in and out."

Rhetorical question: what substantive changes do you expect to see when we get the final regulations?

("The CNMI maintains that the Commonwealth’s guest worker population currently is experiencing high rates of unemployment.")

* I'm not forgetting my Carolinian friends. It's just that I couldn't pass up the word play on Chamorro Standard Time.

Say it ain't so, Joe

Yesterday I wrote that Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio was the 'poster boy' for efforts to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement take away some of the authority it has given to local law enforcement.

Evidently, America's toughest sheriff agreed on a local radio show (Feathered Bastard), where he was criticizing a new agreement that only allows his deputies to screen people who are already in jail on other charges. (I've got to find a new cliche'.)

I started down this path because, like other national immigration issues, the so-called 287(g) agreements are likely to become CNMI news Nov. 28, if not sooner.

The sentence this is taken from could use another rewrite, but evidently the previous agreements allowed "federally trained and supervised state and local law enforcement officials to investigate, apprehend, transport, and detain people who are living and working in the country without authorization." (Huffington Post.

According to the Arizona Republic, "The jail-screening effort helped officials catch nearly 30,000 illegal immigrants since the program began in February 2007, but it was the street-level enforcement that caused the most controversy and produced less substantial results, capturing about 264 illegal-immigration suspects."

Unrepentant, as you can see from the links, Arpaio leaked news of the new agreement in violation of its terms.

Closer to home

Congressman Gregorio C. Sablan says that the Department of Homeland Security is circulating a proposal to require "one additional form" under the coming Guam/CNMI visa waiver program for tourists.

That's a positive, but we're very much the tail of the dog on this one. "Guam" is the operative word here with the Department of Defense asked for comment while it's moving more Marines in.

"Sablan could not say whether DHS intends to apply the same policy for Russian and Chinese tourists visiting Guam," according to the Saipan Tribune.

This *should* have been posted a day ago, but I had an unfortunate encounter with party food and spent the day sitting elsewhere

Profiles in outrage

The Southwest Border Task Force wants to cut back on local enforcement of federal immigration laws, according to Themonitor.com in McAllen, Texas.

"Our goal is to get all of the Southwest border on the same playing field and draw out the realities on the border versus the rhetoric," said Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño, the task force’s vice chairman.

Civil rights and Hispanic groups have urged President Barack Obama’s administration in recent months to end the 287(g) program amid mounting evidence that some participating police departments have used the newly granted authority to justify racial profiling. (That's probably true, but the reporter is making an unsupported argument by using the word 'evidence'. Tch.)

As you'd expect, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the bootcamp jail guy, is the poster boy for the alleged abuses.

There are 18 other recommendations, but I haven't seen the report posted on the DHS website yet. The article summarizes several others.

I've tried to follow what 'the authorities' are doing with racial profiling. We all do something like that naturally, even if it's unconsciously; I think it's genetic. It can be useful *sometimes* but profiling is very, very dangerous to our civil liberties.

Travel travails

There's an interesting blog in the online New York Times suggesting that airport security may have been a factor in the Olympics going to Rio de Janeiro instead of Chicago.

Entering the United States can be "a rather harrowing experience," I.O.C. member from Pakistan Syed Shaid Ali is quoted as saying.

If you've been following U.S. travel numbers, they've been steadily declining since 911. One of the reasons the Marianas Visitors Authority dreads Nov. 28.

Temporary tattoo

Totally unrelated from a local paper: sounds like this purse-snatcher should just cut his hair. "The suspect was described as local male, in his late 30’s, about 5’4” tall, 140-150 pounds, wearing a gray sleeveless shirt, dark shorts, and short dark hair, covered with tattoos."

USCIS website

It's not interesting to a lot of people, but I happily received this e-missive from the Department of Homeland Security:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas and Federal Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients today launched a redesigned USCIS website—available in English and Spanish—a major effort which fulfills President Obama’s pledge to offer enhanced navigation tools for the public to access immigration information and review case status Here's the press release

I'm on board because I've been signed up for DHS emails since the federal immigration ball started rolling toward the CNMI (My inner civil libertarian also wants to see what this huge post-911 monstrosity of a department is up to.)

For instance, a little more than a week ago, I fruitlessly looked for this press release about the proposed foreign investment rules for the Commonwealth. On the new site it was two clicks away. (To be fair, they may not have been updating the old site very well because they knew it was on its way out.)

Ah, those rules; let's take a meeting

The Marianas Variety has a Press Release from Congressman Gregorio C. Sablan with the statement that "Published visa waiver regulations will not be changed before Nov. 28, Napolitano said, although she did hold out the hope of some creative solution to allow Chinese and Russian tourists into the Marianas." So much for having a comment period. Okay, okay, I'm sure there were a lot of comments and they were duly considered. But, still...

Creative solution? Hmm, how about ankle bracelets? Talking to DEA about searching everyone on the planes? That's off the top of my head.

I'm glad the Secretary was able to take the time to discuss the issues, more happy that she "gets it". What does that mean in the real world?

If Napolitano says the tourist visa regulations are signed, sealed and deliverable, I'd guess nil and none are the chances for changes on foreign investment. All in all, not much about the meeting to like, other than the fact it took place. I do like Kilili's last sentences in the Press Release: "I also find it interesting that these investor regulations will even waive fees for investors. This is what we need to do for other people, IRs and permanent residents, who also have made a long-term commitment to the Northern Marianas and cannot easily afford the fees for U.S. visas."

Great suggestion. I hope Napolitano "gets it".

Changing the subject (and why not?)

My daily chuckle came from the line in the release about the USCIS website praising President Obama's pledge and naming all of the officials responsible for it. It reminded me of the current hullabaloo in the 'red'* blogs about the cost of road signs touting projects with 'recovery' or 'stimulus' act funding. Their source seems to be this Washington Times article. "These are self-congratulatory signs; they're political signs", according to Sen. Judd Gregg. "They're so that lawmakers can pat themselves on the back."

The money is small potatoes, though waste is waste (Those $3,000 signs in New Jersey must pad a lot of pockets). Just another teapot tempest.

We see that stuff so much that it's almost invisible. Newspaper notices from supposedly autonomous agencies that have to slip in the Governor's name. The phrase "under the leadership of" slipped gratuitously into stories. Sen. Gregg is either naive or cynical to make such a big deal about it. It's interesting, for instance, that Sen. John McCain's effort to get pork out of the transportation and housing bill didn't get any traction at all.

* (Yes, I hate labels, but that's the closest I can get. They're not exactly conservative, not all Republican. I don't know how else to lump them together in one tent. Even more off of the subject: how did they get to be red, while the liberals got blue. It seems to be an inversion of that whole pinkie, red menace meme.)

The sound of one shoe dropping

USCIS* seems to be plodding away at regulations to begin the transition to U.S. immigration control in the CNMI as (re)scheduled beginning Nov. 28, 2009.

According to Immigration Daily, USCIS will publish proposed rules for nonimmigrant investors in the Sept. 14, 2009 Federal Register. The questions and answers on their website (It's a PDF) certainly look like an official document. I roamed about the USCIS site for a bit, but couldn't find it. That doesn't mean much; it's 1:00 a.m. and I gave up easily.

Expect some howling. Evidently the "E-2 CNMI nonimmigrant Investor" category will grandfather "eligible long-term foreign investors" who have that status before Nov. 28. They get two years initially, renewable until Dec. 31, 2014. After that they have to find another status under U.S. Immigration law.

As proposed, the E-2 visa is CNMI-only; travel elsewhere in the United States would have to be under another status. And... anybody with this status who leaves the Commonwealth would have to get an E-2 visa from a U.S. Embassy or Consulate before re-entering.

The document estimates about 500 long-term investors would be affected. In a recent story the Marianas Variety reported "514 long-term business permit holders and 92 foreign investment certificate holders". As proposed, retiree investors and "Short- and Regular-Term Business Entry Permit" holders would not be eligible.

They're coming, aren't they?

This whole transition to federal control has had a somewhat surreal quality, like a community theater production of Waiting for Godot under the palms. Endless debates about What It All Means while the main character never appears onstage.

Washington Delegate Gregorio C. Sablan got so frustrated that he's suggesting yet another delay because nothing seems to be happening. This is something, I suppose, though it seems like short notice. Comments can be made until October 14, 2009.

Oh, note the date on the PDF: 9/11



* (That's "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services")

Duly chastised, I blog. I used to write letters infrequently, and when I did they were multi-page productions because I had so much *stuff* backed up. Similar situation, this.

Transitions

There's a helpful story on the Department of Homeland Security's "Transition to U.S. Immigration Law in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands" webpage in Monday's Saipan Tribune.

Not that there's anything new, but along with the overview page it gives us a window on what DHS is doing.

Until we got the (bad) news that Chinese and Russian visa waivers weren't likely, there wasn't any word out of Washington. June 1, 2009 is just around the corner and it's past time for them to flesh out the details.

Six months isn't much time to plan for the new immigration rules. We can only hope that these are signs the process is picking up some steam, and that the process doesn't get muddled by the transition to an Obama administration.

Flying off on a tangent

It's really off of the subject, but it's possible Saipan might get occasional visits from another airline. That would be ICE Air, the Flight Operations Unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Of course we'd hardly be able to fill a plane...

Waiving the flags?

The Department of Homeland Security hates tourists. That's the reality we face when we read (Gov. Benigno R.) Fitial to continue pressing for China, Russia visa waivers (Saipan Tribune)

The Christian Science Monitor tells us that Tourism rises globally, but not to U.S. The article notes that "In fact, the annual number of foreign visitors to the US is about 2 million lower than in 2000, leading travel-industry experts to figure that from 2000 to 2007, the US economy took a hit of about $150 billion." Security trumps tourism.

The article quotes Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association about the reasons there are far fewer foreign visitors to trade shows:

On a recent trip to China, Mr. Shapiro met the owner of a chain of 1,200 electronics stores who said he'd love to visit the Las Vegas show – but can't get a visa. While Shapiro may not know why that particular visa request was denied, he does know about the process a Chinese businessperson, tourist, or student has to go through to get a visa.

As he describes it, the applicant must first get to the US Embassy or a city with a US consulate, wait in what can be a long line, and pay a $100 application fee, giving a full accounting of all financial assets. The applicant must then return to the embassy or consulate for a two-minute interview that results in approval for a visa or rejection.

Foreign students face a similar problem. That's probably going to be the next local headline when the regulations are finalized.

There's certainly a connection to the Marines moving to Guam, with some spillover expected to the Northern Marianas. China and Russia are hardly hotbeds of terrorism, though some Chechens have been among the 'foreign fighters' in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military security, visa fraud and other criminal activity are more likely to be the "security concerns" cited in the proposed regulations.

As I so persuasively argued in Immigrate Expectations, the CNMI is likely to get lost in national immigration issues. From recent discussions on ILW.COM, it appears that Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation is very likely early in the next U.S. Congress. Any exceptions for Guam and the CNMI would be seen as precedents and it's hard to see bureaucrats sticking their necks out in that political climate.

Maybe the Governor can bring it up if he meets President-elect Barack Obama while attending the inauguration.

Okay, my tongue is firmly in cheek on that one.

Marianas zen

In the spirit of former House Speaker Oscar "suitcase" Rasa's threat to sue Gregorio "motorcade" Cruz, I offer the following koan:

Which one would you support?

Another test, would this be a non sequitur? NMI's conservation plan paves way for commercial fishing

Shrinking pains. Study sees steep job losses under federalization

There's always the military buildup. And, um, Homeland Security makes it a dim sum. Visa waivers for Russia, China dim

But if it was the federal government... Fitial: Lawsuit over LaoLao lease irresponsible, nonsense. And if you don't like the result... DelRosario: Court's order to seize DPL assets unfair

Paying for Guam's cranes? Matson to hike Guam, NMI rates in Feb..

But there are "new twists to the swimsuit competition." Stellar Marianas to present last Miss Marianas pageant

Maybe it's Guam today and here tomorrow. Gas falls below $3 a gallon. But $3.13 isn't bad

Or give them to the Obama family. Guthertz: Let GAIN help greyhounds (That's Guam Animals In Need)

My computer, locked up

I know this is a serious subject, but my sense of the absurd kicked in when I got the Washington Post article Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border in an email. I had immediate visions of renditions, or trips to Gitmo.

Seriously then. We all know, or should, that privacy in the United States pretty much ends at our front door. As long as we stay in the Homeland (A grand Newspeak concept), we're still protected by conceits like probable cause.

All bets are off when we travel internationally. Your laptop, your cellphone, even your ipod with Ludacris rapping Politics as usual may be 'detained' for 'a reasonable period of time' by the Department of Homeland Security.

That's "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form" in addition to "all papers and other written documentation." Oh, and that can all be shared with other agencies and private entities. More from the Post:

"The policies . . . are truly alarming," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government's border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin.

"In April, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the government's power to conduct searches of an international traveler's laptop without suspicion of wrongdoing", the Post adds. If the Ninth Circuit signs off on it, no other court is going to oppose.

The policies are dated July 16, according to the Post, though they've been around for a lot longer.

For more information,see if you can get http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/travel/admissability/
search_authority.ctt/search_authority.pdf to work. It's giving me problems when I try to load it.