Majority of CNMI Employers Ignore Reporting Requirement for Foreign Workers
By David North on November 17, 2022
We have known for a long time that a speck of American territory – the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, just north of Guam – has a foreign-worker-dominated labor market, more akin to a Gulf emirate than to any American jurisdiction.
We now have fresh data to prove that generalization. A federal law signed by Donald Trump in 2018, and its follow-on regulations, call for all employers in the CNMI to report every six months on how many workers, citizens and aliens, they have on their payrolls.
As background, the CNMI employers have more access to foreign workers under more relaxed rules than anywhere else under the U.S. flag (except maybe American Samoa which has its own immigration law). There is a special visa category, CW-1, for alien workers who cannot qualify for any of the multitudinous foreign worker categories available on the Mainland. Most foreign workers in the islands are from China or the Philippines and they are dominant in the private-sector economy; they are also, often, ill-paid.
https://cis.org/North/Majority-CNMI-Employers-Ignore-Reporting-Requirement-Foreign-Workers
