Going On Their Mariana Way
Is President Bush`s guest-worker program a good idea? The experiment has already been conducted-with disasterous results.
How bad could it be? Just ask any U.S. citizen of the Northern Mariana Islands. For example:
Distortion. But moves to limit abuse are irrelevant to the more fundamental impact of a foreign-labor program: the abnormal development of the host society. The foreign-labor program has completely transformed the CNMI's society in a single generation. About 70 percent of the population is now foreign-born, almost all of it non-citizen. Chamorros, the main indigenous ethnic group, used to be a clear majority; they are now barely a quarter of the population.
The guestworker system has also reinforced in the locals a culture of pervasive dependence on government. Fully 70 percent of the labor force is non-citizens, and at least 85 percent of all private-sector jobs are held by Asians. U.S. citizens have an unemployment rate triple that of non-citizens; of the indigenous Chamorros who do have jobs, 56 percent work for the government, fueling a doubling in the size of the bureaucracy since 1980.
The 2000 census found a poverty rate on the islands of 46 percent, up significantly from just two years earlier, and nearly quadruple the U.S. rate. A recent survey found that two-thirds of children in the Commonwealth received food assistance from the local or federal government. The number of people receiving federal Food Stamps specifically has increased more than sevenfold in less than a decade.
What is more, the system is ripe with corruption-just ask their lobbyist Jack Abramoff!
``Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it``
George Santayana
How bad could it be? Just ask any U.S. citizen of the Northern Mariana Islands. For example:
Distortion. But moves to limit abuse are irrelevant to the more fundamental impact of a foreign-labor program: the abnormal development of the host society. The foreign-labor program has completely transformed the CNMI's society in a single generation. About 70 percent of the population is now foreign-born, almost all of it non-citizen. Chamorros, the main indigenous ethnic group, used to be a clear majority; they are now barely a quarter of the population.
The guestworker system has also reinforced in the locals a culture of pervasive dependence on government. Fully 70 percent of the labor force is non-citizens, and at least 85 percent of all private-sector jobs are held by Asians. U.S. citizens have an unemployment rate triple that of non-citizens; of the indigenous Chamorros who do have jobs, 56 percent work for the government, fueling a doubling in the size of the bureaucracy since 1980.
The 2000 census found a poverty rate on the islands of 46 percent, up significantly from just two years earlier, and nearly quadruple the U.S. rate. A recent survey found that two-thirds of children in the Commonwealth received food assistance from the local or federal government. The number of people receiving federal Food Stamps specifically has increased more than sevenfold in less than a decade.
What is more, the system is ripe with corruption-just ask their lobbyist Jack Abramoff!
``Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it``
George Santayana
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 5:24 AM
2 Comments:
Looks like welfare did more damage than the atomic bombs did.
Illegal immigration is really the slavery of our present day. It's simply a way for businesses to have cheap slave labor and to compete with the prison camp conditions in China and many other Third World countries. And in the end, it will do us in just as it did the Romans in when slaves and barbarians outnumbered the indigenous population -- Rome fell.
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