Punishment Exceeds Crime
They brought the mess on themselves, but Washington is doing its best to make the punishment exceed the crime.
The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands is a U.S. territory, but is not always governed under the same rules as the rest of us. One of the exceptions was to allow the local government to control its own immigration, the theory being that what happens on small islands in the western Pacific likely won’t hurt the United States. That resulted in untold numbers of improper visas and lots of stories of corruption involving high officials in the CNMI. The Feds, rightly, cracked down and required that anyone who traveled from the Northern Marianas to Guam had to go through Immigration again. (There are no direct flights from the CNMI to either Hawaii or the U.S. Mainland, so anyone trying to enter the United States proper had to either fly through Guam or go back to Asia and start over.)
Tinian's Future?
The travel industry in the Northern Marianas has been dominated by Japanese tourism companies providing a quick, cheap holiday in the tropics, usually on Saipan. Steady income, but not much growth there. But things have been picking up with the advent of casino resorts on Tinian and Rota, which are proving attractive to visitors from China and Russia’s Far East looking to try their luck. Since the local sweatshop apparel industry died, the CNMI has been looking for a viable industry and many thought that Tinian could be the Vegas of the western Pacific.
“Not so!” says the U.S. Congress, which passed P.L. 110-229 last year to extend full U.S. Immigration law to Guam and the Northern Marianas. The law comes into effect November 28, imposing tougher rules about which Chinese and Russians can come throw their money at a roulette wheel. To make matters worse, the Department of Homeland Security isn’t ready to enforce the law. The CNMI has six ports of entry and DHS hasn’t been able to put enough immigration officers in place, and likely won’t be able to fully staff the Northern Marianas until sometime in 2011. Their solution? Close the airports on Rota and Tinian to foreign flights, forcing the Russians and Chinese to fly to Saipan first, clear Immigration and then change planes. So, we make it tougher to get visas, then add inconvenience on top of that. Talk about ways to kill a tourism industry.
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