I’m haunted.
I see Invisible People.
I see the scandals that made them invisible. Scandals rendered invisible by corrupt politicians, an incurious media and a culture addicted to the trivial and obsessed with pointless diversions.
I look for justice, but at the beginning of this new century, it too is all but invisible in America.
Where does one begin? After all there are so many invisible people.
Iraq. Darfur. Afghanistan. New Orleans. The poor. The sick. There are a lot of folks—a lot of stories of the invisible.
I suspect that you see them. That may be why you are a progressive. Why you are reading this Diary. Why you act.
Many Diaries are written to give form, to give substance to the invisible and their stories. They are written to help us connect. Focus our vision. Sharpen our understanding. Ignite our rage. And move us to action.
This is one of those Diaries—a story of invisible people that I invite you to see as human. Like you. Like me. Like the folks you love.
I invite you to see them as people who are real, flawed, complex, and courageous.
I challenge you to see yourself in them and to demand justice for them.
Jump with me...
As those who have been following my Diaries know, I have mostly written about the growing Jack Abramoff Scandal and the Republican Culture of Corruption. I have been following this story since 1999.
What drew me into this story was the organized abuse of the Guest Workers on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US Territory in the Western Pacific some 40 miles North of Guam.
I first learned about these Guest Workers back in 1998. Nine years ago, I had just started working at Co-op America a National nonprofit dedicated to harnessing economic action—our collective power as consumers, investors, workers and business leaders—to build a socially just and environmentally sound planet.
I signed on as their Publications Director. The first publication I worked on was a Summer issue of Co-op America Quarterly that focused on how to use your economic power to help end sweatshops. This introduced me to the conditions of Guest Workers on the Marianas Islands.
By the next year, corporations were reeling from consumer pressure and it was looking like Congress was going to take some action on sweatshops and to specifically target the abuse on the CNMI. For the summer of 1999 we decided to do a follow-up issue of the Quarterly on sweatshops.
I spent time researching the supply chain, the companies involved, the laws that made it possible and economic/consumer-based solutions. My research led me to take a closer look at the conditions of Guest Workers on the CNMI.
I was appalled. This was very close to modern slavery.
The workers came from many impoverished countries and they were being used as expendable commodities to increase profits of the greedy. They effectively had no rights. Economic pressure and consumer/shareholder demand for corporate accountability could (and did) help end some sweatshops around the globe, but to solve the abuse on this rogue US Territory it would require action from the Federal government.
As we worked that summer, it seemed that 1999 would be the year when Congressional action would end the abuse. Bills had passed the Senate and had more than enough sponsors to pass the House. Media reports about sweatshops and the abuse on the Mariana Islands seemed to be everywhere. I felt that there would be a major victory for the Guest Workers on the CNMI before the year was out.
It didn’t happen.
The effort died in the House of Representatives. It never came up for a vote.
I was stunned. I had been naively optimistic.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why.
I started heading to the Clerk of the House to look at Lobbying Disclosure forms (they were not online back then) and to the Library of Congress to look at newspaper reports from the Mariana Islands and stateside. I searched online (pre-Google) and used what research tools I could find.
I wanted to know how this happen and I found out.
I found Jack Abramoff.
As I dug into his background, clients, donations and connections to the leadership of the Republican Party and the larger conservative movement, I became amazed at the depth and breadth of, what to me, was a massive scandal.
Suddenly I had a new "hobby".
The more I dug, the more visible the scandal became to me. And the more I could see the victims of an economic systems designed to operate in the dark shadows of globalization.
As I learned more and more stories, as I read testimony, saw footage of interviews, these abstract people—these Guest Workers—became visible to me. They were invited to come and work in "America" under the Our Flag, with the implicit promise of the protection of our laws and our justice. For more than twenty-five years a system of abuse that can be justly called Slavery 2.0 has been protected and allowed to flourish on the CNMI. Before Jack Abramoff became a household name this filled me with rage and a hunger for justice and it still does.
Last February, I sat in amazement as yet another young woman traveled 9,000 miles to tell Senators of how she was forced into prostitution and raped on the CNMI. Almost ten years ago, it was a different young woman telling a very similar story to some of the very same Senators.
I wanted to scream.
And still the very Pirates of Saipan who have profited off this modern slavery have a seat at the table to negotiate changes to the law. They get to bargain with the 110th Congress on just how much "Justice" should be extended to the CNMI.
Meanwhile, the Guest Workers are invisible.
Now, that is not literally true (I say that for the benefit of any trolls out there). They can be seen. They are unavoidable on the CNMI. After all, like slaves in the American South, they outnumber the vested citizens of the CNMI almost 2 to 1. By invisible, I mean that we discount their humanity. I mean that they are objects. Pawns. Things.
It is their unacknowledged humanity that makes them invisible. It is an invisibility that has allowed the abuse on the CNMI to exist for twenty-five years. An invisibility that allows the 110th Congress to consider selling them out with changes to the Minimum Wage Bill and/or watered down CNMI reform legislation. An invisibility that allows the CNMI Government to create a warren of separate, contradictory and confusing legal processes that condemn these workers to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It is an invisibility that crushes the soul.
It is an invisibility that drove Buddhi Lal Dhimal—a Nepalese guest worker on the CNMI for the last 10 years—to set himself on fire:
That was almost two weeks ago.
The immediate plan on Saipan was to put him on a plane and send him to a hospital in Manila, Philippines. Sure, Dhimal would get better care than is available on the CNMI, but he would still be deported and he would not get the money he was owed.
Now Dhimal’s story is a complicated one. I wrote about it here and here.
Since the reports of his transfer to Manila, Dhimal was out of the CNMI papers. That is, until today. During the news blackout I had been in email contact with various folks on the CNMI trying to learn details about Dhimal’s condition. It was mostly rumors, but there were some facts embedded in them.
One was that Dhimal’s condition was critical and they would not move him to Manila until he improved. There were various stories about how much money was he owed and by whom and how many legal processes he was involved in. There was a rumor that Dhimal had a daughter on the CNMI, but that she would have nothing to do with him. Another rumor had Dhimal intending to set somebody else on fire, but decided upon himself when that person would not come near him. Some stories had him "gaming" the system. In others he was weirdo, a dangerous "loner".
An email from the community of Nepalese Guest Workers on the CNMI painted a different picture:
...a tragic incident was occurred in Saipan last two weeks ago. A male alien worker who was jobless Nepalese national, attempted to commit suicide himself. according to his Friend—that his former employer didn’t pay his back wages so he field labor case but almost a year labor not give a final judgment he had no money to eat, house rent and money for his family members back in Nepal those are waiting for his money they are under poverty they need money to survive but he couldn't afforded. always he visited to labor office and always received a false promises from labor official, he got upset and attempt to committed suicide so he pour gasoline and ignite fire to his body and burned himself in side the labor office building during office hour. Now he is in critical condition in the intensive care unit at hospital fighting for his life. He is the one tried to scarified his life to prove that how bad the local administration, how bad their behavior and how bad their policy to alien worker...
That added more details to the story, but not quite enough for some to see Buddhi Lal Dhimal as real—to see him as human.
Perhaps the report in today’s Saipan Tribune will help to make him visible:
The 49-year-old Dhimal remains in serious condition at the Commonwealth Health Center's intensive care unit, according to his daughter, Babitra Dhimal.
Babitr Dhimal, 21, told Saipan Tribune yesterday that CHC's plan to transfer her father to a Manila hospital did not push through because he has lung problems. Babitra said a CHC staff told her they could not bring him to the Philippines because he is still hooked to an oxygen tank.
Dhimal’s daughter has been visiting him at the hospital. He has suffered second and third degree burns on his face, chest and arms. He is on oxygen. His major health problem is in his lungs and his daughter thinks that may be due to the fire extinguisher that was used to douse the flames. He is healing from the burns.
Babitr came to the CNMI in 2005. She is the oldest of Dhimal’s four children. The youngest is in the 8th grade and her remaining siblings are at home with her mother in Nepal. The money Dhimal and his daughter send home is critical to the survival of the family. Babitr has been working as a casher at 99 Cents, a store in the Garapan district. Here is what she had to say about her father:
[he] is a "nice person" and a "very supportive and loving father." [snip]
She said that, although her father had encountered many Labor problems on Saipan, he still managed to support the family financially.
Babitra had already finished her second year in college in Nepal when her father arranged for her to come to Saipan in 2005. She started work at 99 Cents five months ago and became the breadwinner in the family when Dhimal became jobless for a year.
Babitra said when she came to the island she was surprised to see the living condition of her father. [snip]
The father and daughter have been staying in a very small rented apartment room with one common restroom shared with other tenants near the Capital Bowling Center in Garapan.
She said her father had never gone back to Nepal since he arrived on the island in 1997.
He wanted to go back home to start a business, but he was waiting for the $5,000 owed him, pursuant to a Labor administrative order by Asia Pacific Investment Corp. where he worked before as a mason.
Like most of us, when he dreamed of the future, Buddhi Lal Dhimal dreamed of a better world for his family. He worked hard. He sacrificed. He lived in deplorable conditions. Based on the news reports he worked multiple jobs and he worked for wages that unvalued his worth. He worked in a system stacked against him and the rest of the Guest Workers of the CNMI.
He saved, or so he thought, about $5,000 through his labor. It was stolen from him. As he fought for his money in court, he lost the right to legally work on the CNMI after almost 10 years of working as a security guard at L&T, a Tan Family sweatshop on Saipan. He was moved into the multiple stovepipes of the CNMI legal system where even if one process gives a worker a victory another process is designed to take it away.
Even as he fought to get his money, the CNMI Government moved to deport him. According to press reports, on the day he set himself on fire he had been ordered to come to the labor Department to pick-up his plane ticket for a forced return to Nepal before he had a day in court to force an employer to pay him his past due wages.
Babitra told the Saipan Tribune that she would accompany her father to many hearings as her English was better. All Dhimal wanted from the CNMI was a temporary work permit to allow him to work while his labor dispute was being settled. The stovepipes of CNMI injustice said no.
As a father I feel for him. I understand this. I imagine the sense of desperation, the fear of failure. In some small ways I can relate to it, but the hopelessness built into the CNMI labor system must be overwhelming.
Self-immolation is a specific act, especially when it is carried out in the presence of the powerful by the powerless. It is an act of protest, anger and desperation.
I am haunted that in my Country, in the United States of America, we allowed such injustice to flourish. I am haunted and I am shamed.
I see Buddhi Lal Dhimal as human. I see him as me and as you.
I see his family as my family. I heard the pain in his Daughter’s words:
"I was shocked. I never thought it would happen," she said.
Babitra said six days ago, her sister, a 12th grader, kept crying on the phone and wanted to talk to their father.
Babitra said if the government or anybody in the community could help them, she and their family would be very happy.
"But first, I want my Dad's condition to get better. That is important to me," she added.
We can help.
- We can make the Guest Workers of the CNMI visible. (We can make ALL workers visible).
- We can demand that the scandals behind this abuse are investigated and that the guilty are punished. Abramoff was only the bagman.
- We can insist that Congress pass a Minimum Wage Bill that includes the CNMI just like it did a few weeks ago as part of the Iraq Funding Resolution vetoed by Bush.
- We can demand real reform to the abuse on the CNMI. Reform that brings real justice to the Guest Workers
- We can work to ensure that any Immigration Reform in the US does not create a Guest Worker system on the Mainland like the one created on the CNMI. We need to be aware that any and all proposed Guest Worker schemes invite abuse.
And if you wish to help Buddhi Lal Dhimal and his family, a long-time human rights worker for the CNMI has worked with her lawyer to set up a fund to get aid to Dhimal and his family. The attorney is Pam Brown and she has been a foe of the Pirates of Saipan for a very long time. I have a great deal of respect for the folks behind this fund and I am sure that any money donated will get to Dhimal and his family.
As a result of victories in past lawsuits against various Pirates on Saipan, Pam Brown has been managing a Trust fund to get aid to guest workers on the CNMI. That Client Trust will be used to help Dhimal and his family. You can donate to this Client Trust by:
sending a check (or money order) made out to:
Pam Brown Client Trust,
PO Box 5077,
Saipan, MP 96950.
Earmark the check Buddhi Lal Dhimal.
This will help Dhilmal, but there are thousands of other workers who will only be helped when we tear down this economic system rooted in neo-slavery. Even today, the abuse continues as the papers report that CNMI police officers attacked workers protesting the loss of their jobs and wages (oddly some of these workers were recently imported to the CNMI even as officials worked to deport Dhimal and other long-term Guest Workers).
The economic system on the CNMI is an injustice. It is rooted in the shadow world of global trade (human trafficking, sweatshops, forced prostitution, money laundering, drug smuggling, gun running and the like).
We must demand that the 110th Congress shut down the loopholes and bring the CNMI under US laws and regulations. This includes the minimum wage and immigration reform. Laws are being drafted, but we will have to watch Congress.
This abuse was protected by Republicans for years. They kept it invisible. If it survives now it will be because Democrats in Congress, the Senate and all of our Presidential Candidates refuse to see this system of abuse or see these Guest Workers.
We have power now. We should use it to do something.
We should use it to make Justice visible again in America.
If Democrats in the 110th Congress sell out workers like Dhimal, they will be no better that Abramoff, Rove, Bush and the rest.
We need to insist that our side does the right thing.
And ending the abuse on the CNMI is the right thing to do.
It is way past time for Justice.
Cheers.
UPDATE
And right on cue, the Saipan Tribune is
reporting that the proposed CNMI legislation from the Bush OIA would extend Federal control and rights to workers like Dhimal:
Draft bill to grandfather long-term guest workers
The draft CNMI immigration bill calls for federal control of the guest worker program, with a plan to issue "indefinite non-immigrant CNMI residents visa" to long-term nonresident workers. This visa can allow them to travel to the United States for work and study.
The outline of the draft immigration bill, a copy of which was obtained by the Saipan Tribune, provides the "grandfathering" of long-term guest employees who have been in the CNMI five years prior to the proposed law.
Under the provision, the Secretary of State "shall issue non-immigrant visas to aliens who have lawfully resided in the CNMI and have resided in the CNMI for at least five years prior to the date of enactment of this Act and who apply, during a one-time limited window, to be indefinite non-immigrant CNMI residents."
No wonder the Pirates of Saipan are cleansing the territory of long time Guest Workers.
This legislation needs to be strengthened and passed ASAP.