Tenorio has been courting the GOP in Congress. Over the past year, he has invited several members of Congress and dozens of staff members to visit his tropical isles on expense-paid junkets. The powerful industry has benefited from local control of immigration and the minimum wage by bringing in thousands of cheap and docile temporary foreign workers, mostly Chinese, to toil in factories that turn out clothing for the U.S. market. The result, U.S. officials say, is an end-run around the quotas and tariffs that apply to garment imports, as well as the minimum wages and workers' rights mandated in U.S. domestic manufacturing. Before they leave China, workers must sign contracts with the Chinese government that violate their rights on U.S. soil, the Interior Department says.
Violators face penalties back in China.
Overall, local control over immigration has been used to bring in so many Asian guest workers for various private sector jobs that native islanders now make up a minority of the 60,000 population. The foreign workers hold more than 90 percent of the jobs in the private sector, while unemployment among natives exceeds 14 percent. In short, a recent Interior Department report said, commonwealth leaders have turned the territory into the tropical equivalent of a Persian Gulf sheikdom. Gov. Tenorio has shrugged off such criticisms, insisting that local control of immigration and the minimum wage is needed to keep the islands' economy humming. He said the comments were made at a congressional luncheon hosted for him by Republicans Dana Rohrabacher, Brian P. Bilbray and Ed Royce of California and John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee.