History, Politics, Immigration, CNMI

The Unity Manifesto

By Kelvin Rodeo (2014)

A historical manifesto originally printed in CNMI newspapers in 2014, calling for unity, justice for guest workers, and an end to political division in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The Unity Manifesto

A call for justice, solidarity, and a shared CNMI future

"It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong."

– Grover Norquist

Divide and conquer: the oldest trick in the book. The trick they're using on us right now. Unfortunately, it seems to be working. In a time when we should all be working together to solve our many problems, we seem to be at our most divided. Instead of everyone uniting to fight against all of this corruption, instead of everyone uniting to work toward bringing about a better future for the generations to come, we seem to be quite at odds with each other. Anti-foreign worker rhetoric seems to be at an all-time high among a group of NMDs, who direct their anger over their cultural and employment problems towards the foreign workers and chastise other NMDs who support the foreign workers. Foreign workers are feeling confused, hurt, betrayed, and hopeless, and some of them are even starting to build resentment towards locals because of the sharp increase of anti-foreign worker rhetoric that's been tossed around over the past few years. Bitterness has split us up and turned us against each other, and while everyone is at odds with each other, the real culprits continue their shady maneuvering; the real culprits continue to play with human lives.

We're all just pawns in their grand chess game of life, a game that they've rigged from the start to ensure their own victory. And with the populace so distracted by our fears that we lash out at each other in fits of misdirected anger, the real reason for our problems continues to freely work against what is best for the people of the CNMI. Our government has been playing a long game with us, and, sadly, we've been on a losing streak for a while now. We will continue to be on this losing streak until we see through their game and come together as a united force of CNMI people to stand up and say "Enough is enough!" In all of this turmoil, we've forgotten something very important, the fundamental truth that allowed the CNMI's economy and infrastructure to develop so well over the past few decades: We are a community, and we have all worked together over the past thirty years to build our Commonwealth into what it is today. We all love these islands and call them home, and we all want to see our Commonwealth prosper. We need to remember this truth, and reconnect with it, if we are to save our islands for future generations.

Our Commonwealth was prosperous, once upon a time, but that prosperity came at a price. A high one. While most people today would look back on that period of the CNMI as the good old days, there are many who look back on those days and remember much darker times in their lives. Back in those days, largely unbeknownst to us, many of the people who had come to our islands to work had been lied to about what their work would entail, many had inhumane working hours and wages, many had been taken advantage of, and many had been so downtrodden that they wanted to go home, but couldn't. When these atrocities were discovered by politicians like George Miller, who introduced a bill that would end the exploitation of the foreign workers, our government used our money to hire notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who enlisted the help of Tom DeLay to prevent the bill from passing into law. I included at the beginning of this an ironic quote from Grover Norquist, who worked with Abramoff and DeLay to help protect the exploitation of the foreign workers by spreading the idea that the situation in the CNMI was a free market issue. In doing so, he played his part in helping to create the very divide that he decries in his quote, the very divide that now exists among our people. Instead of doing the right thing, the moral thing, the people we elected to represent us took action to obstruct justice and prolong the exploitation and suffering of our brothers and sisters, all in our name and with millions of our dollars.

And we stood by and let it all happen. So the system continued for a while longer, until the next decade came along and the exploited foreign workers of the CNMI came up again, this time with the federal government considering improved status for the long-term foreign workers as a part of the federalization of the CNMI's immigration system. But then various forces went to work again and struck any notions of that from the version that ended up passing into law as the CNRA. The foreign workers, who had begun to finally stand up for themselves, were counting on federalization bringing them their long-overdue improved status, but they were betrayed by the very cause that they had championed. Then there was also Public Law 15-108, which contained the controversial Exit Provision in Section 4953, requiring the foreign workers to exit the Commonwealth within 15 days of the termination of their employment contract and remain absent from the Commonwealth for at least six months during every 42-month period. This law was so controversial that it resulted in the CNMI's first mass demonstration involving thousands of people in the Unity March of 2007, to repeal PL 15-108. And then there was House Resolution 18-34, a resolution passed by our House of Representatives last year which basically begged the federal government not to grant the foreign workers of the CNMI any form of improved status, a resolution that had very blatant racist rhetoric throughout its body.

And now that the CW program was supposed to come to a close at the end of this year, our government pushed again in a direction that would be detrimental to our brothers and sisters! Instead of acknowledging the truth of the situation and doing the right thing, our government acknowledged the truth of the situation when numerous government officials stated that we still need these people in our islands, but they did the wrong thing by pushing for an extension of the CW program instead of advocating for improved status for all of these people who have helped to develop our beautiful home over the years. Over the years, these people have continued to build our roads, our schools, clean our hotel rooms, cook and serve our meals, drive our taxis, take care of our children, fix our cars and our computers, and all of the other jobs that they have been doing in the time they've been in our islands. They do this despite all of the hardships and opposition that they have faced from the local government, because they love us and our islands and consider the CNMI to be their home. With a history like the one that countless foreign workers have had to live through in the CNMI over the past 31 years, I am absolutely dumbfounded that we are still allowing our government to continue getting away with this exploitative system. The moral thing to do, the just thing to do, is to join our brothers and sisters in their struggle and show them how much we appreciate everything they have done for our islands. They need our support, our voices, if they are to gain the improved status and rights that they all deserve after their many years of service to our Commonwealth. This is a time for unity. We can no longer afford to ignore their plight.

Back when the garment industry was booming, everyone chose to look the other way because of the effect that the garment industry was having on our economy. We ignored the stories of abuse and we did nothing to combat the injustice that was being carried out on the foreign workers, we essentially allowed it to continue; back then, everyone was generally friendly to each other, but once the garment industry started to fail, all eyes were suddenly on the foreign workers and suddenly the poor state of our local economy was somehow the fault of these people. Some locals began to blame our problems on the foreign workers, and the divide between the groups began to grow as their anti-foreign worker rhetoric intensified. Today the foreign workers are still suffering a grave injustice, and again, we seem to be looking the other way. I implore you all not to turn your backs, not to look the other way this time, but to stand up, to speak up, and to take action in support of the foreign workers. We all know and understand deep inside that these people aren't aliens, they're not guest workers; they are people, they are our brothers and sisters who have worked tirelessly over the past three decades to help us build our economy and infrastructure, who love our islands as much as we do and call them home, they are faces we've seen and people we've talked to many times over the course of our lives, they are CNMI residents just as much as we are. To not stand up and publicly support their struggle to be recognized as official residents and citizens of this country is not only indecent and immoral, but it is a slap in the face of every single foreign worker that we have known over the years.

In their eyes, the lack of public support for their struggle means the public approval of the government's actions toward the foreign workers. Many of them feel abandoned and betrayed, which is causing resentment to build as more distance is added to the divide between the groups. They need our support. Most of them avoid conflict and quietly await their fate because they feel like they don't have a voice in any of this since they are not US citizens or permanent residents, and because they are afraid. They are afraid of losing their jobs, they are afraid of angering the community that has hosted them for so long, they are afraid that doing something might somehow hasten their pending departure from our Commonwealth. Our brothers and sisters feel like they have no voice, so they take no action to fight for the rights that we all know they deserve. But we have a voice; as the people who elect our officials into office, we can stand up together with our brothers and sisters and demand that our government officially advocate the granting of permanent residency with a pathway to citizenship for our brothers and sisters who have been with us for all this time. We already looked the other way once before. We cannot afford to look the other way again this time. These people aren't just numbers and statistics, they are human beings. Our government is playing with human lives.

This is all part of their game; they pit us against each other, and while we're distracted by that manufactured conflict, they continue to suck the life out of the CNMI to enrich themselves and their corporate benefactors. They will continue to play this game with us and they will continue to get away with it, unless we can all come together and work as a united force to end their long game and secure the future of our Commonwealth. We must remember that we are all united by our desire to see our islands survive and thrive. We must also keep in mind another thing that unites most of us: our belief in God, and our faith in Jesus Christ. It's no secret that the majority of the CNMI population considers themselves to be some form of Christian. Christianity is deeply rooted in our modern culture in the CNMI, with multiple churches present in every town and several Christian private schools scattered across the island. Most people go to church on Sundays, and most people celebrate Christmas and Easter and observe Lent. Despite this, it seems like most of us have forgotten what it really means to be a Christian: to be a follower of Christ. How can we claim to be spiritual people, people of God, followers of Christ, who are supposed to trust that our Heavenly Father will always take care of us, and then at the same time work so hard to prevent our brothers and sisters, other children of God, from becoming our equals and gaining the very same rights that we all currently enjoy? We seem to have allowed our irrational fear of losing what we have now to supplant what's supposed to be more important: our love for and trust in God. Our brothers and sisters need our support and our love right now. Where is our Christianity now? Where is our compassion, our love? Why have we allowed fear to replace these things?

There are those who fear that the presence of the foreign workers in the CNMI has led to the demise of our language and culture. There are those who fear that they'll never find jobs because the foreign workers are stealing them. But all of these fears are baseless. It wasn't the foreign workers that led to the demise of our language and culture; we did that to ourselves when we decided to allow the western globalist culture to envelop our islands and when we decided to start using English as our primary means of communication with each other. The damage has been done, but there is still hope for our cultural wound to heal, if we work together. Contrary to popular anti-immigrant rhetoric, the foreign workers are not stealing our jobs. The truth of the matter is, these jobs were never really meant for us to begin with. Three years after the Nonresident Workers Act became law, our legislature passed the Alien Labor Act of 1986, Public Law 05-32. Section 11(a) of this law required employers to ensure that 10% of their full-time workforce consisted of resident workers, with that number increasing by at least 2% per year until the resident worker requirement reaches 20%. From the infancy of our guest worker program, our own government only intended for residents of the CNMI to make up 20% of each employer's workforce. Do you think our government didn't know that this was going to happen?

The government knew that they could exploit the foreign workers and allowed so many to come to our islands and work so that they would have a highly profitable economic machine with no end in sight. They didn't care about the population boom because none of the foreign workers had voting rights and could not sway public policy. This left our elected officials with a relatively small electorate, the majority of which they could manipulate and buy votes from through nepotism and handouts. If you're angry about the current state of the CNMI or about your inability to find employment, stop wasting time and direct your anger at the real culprit: our own government, which orchestrated this whole situation so that the blame would be deflected towards our brothers and sisters, and they could continue with their corrupt ways as they laugh and watch us, the people of the CNMI, fight amongst ourselves.

These people are our brothers and sisters, and they are much more loyal to our islands than their detractors would like us to believe. They stayed in our islands and continued to renew their contracts over the years because they truly feel at home in the CNMI and they considered us to be their brothers and sisters. These people are our brothers and sisters. This is their home. This is our home. They don't want to leave. They won't leave after they obtain residency and citizenship. They are proud to be a part of this CNMI family, and we should recognize them as such. We must unite if we are to beat this game that's being played on us all.

The only thing that the CW extension does is allow this grave injustice to continue for another five years. The simple truth is, the quickest and most efficient solution for this so-called problem would be for the government of the CNMI to take on an official stance of advocating for U.S. permanent residency and a pathway to citizenship for all of our long-term nonresident workers currently in the CNMI. But, the sad truth is, our elected officials will never do that. Not until we demand it of them.

Let's dream of two Commonwealths, brothers and sisters. In the first one, we did not stand up for our brothers and sisters, and they ended up being repatriated en masse after over 35 years of dedication to our Commonwealth, leaving behind ghost towns in what used to be densely populated villages and commercial centers. The CNMI's development is not only halted, but also set back a few decades. Our Commonwealth is known around the world as the sweatshop labor exploitation country that collapsed on itself. In the second one, we figured out their game in 2014 and woke up, much to their dismay. We embraced our brothers and sisters and joined them in support of their struggle for equal rights. The CNMI government took on an official stance of granting them what they deserve, and then the federal government capitulated and included a provision in its comprehensive immigration reform package that granted permanent residence with a fast track to U.S. citizenship to all foreign workers that had been living and working in the CNMI with proper documentation for 5 or more years. This was hailed around the world as a huge humanitarian victory, and the CNMI's old reputation as a sweatshop labor and exploitation haven was replaced by its new reputation as a brave nation that dared to do the morally right thing in a world where morals were giving way to strips of colored paper. And thus began what would be known as the Golden Age of the CNMI.

Which dream would you rather have come true? We are at a pivotal crossroads in our history, brothers and sisters. Think about all that we could accomplish as a united force of CNMI residents. We have been pawns in their game for far too long, and it's time for us to wake up, as a community, and put an end to their long game. Whatever else may divide us, we must remember what binds us all together: the CNMI is our home, and we want to see our Commonwealth survive and thrive. It's time to unite.

I don't expect anyone who reads this to accept everything that I've written. All I can do is hope that some of the things I said rang true enough to enough people to make even the slightest difference in the fate of our Commonwealth. It's time to stop letting our lives be played with. If you are as tired of this game as I am, then please take action. It's time to end their long game. It's time to unite.

Kelvin Rodeo