When Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski traveled to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands four years ago to investigate alleged human rights abuses, he found what he was looking for. Speaking on the Senate floor a year later, Murkowski said he ''visited a garment factory and talked with some Bangladesh workers who had not been paid and who were living in appalling conditions.''
At a more recent hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that he chairs, Murkowski heard from a young woman who had been taken to Saipan as a minor and was forced into prostitution.
TX: ''This was occurring under the U.S. flag and supposedly with the protection all U.S. citizens enjoy under our Constitution,'' Murkowski said in his Senate speech.
Based on this evidence and more, Murkowski pushed legislation through the Senate in February to correct some of the conditions in the Mariana Islands that many people believe have turned the island territory into a haven for foreign sweatshops that ship more than $1 billion worth of duty-free clothing to U.S. stores.
Murkowski's bill sailed through his committee and was unanimously approved by the Senate. There was not one dissenting vote along the way. But there it died, stopped cold in the House by his Republican colleague Alaska Rep. Don Young, chairman of the House Resources Committee.
Why?
Young said he simply doesn't believe such abuses have taken place.
''I'm not going to move anything,'' Young said of Murkowski's bill.
''There's no need to move anything,'' he said. ''Why should you move anything that's really been fueled, very frankly, by hysteria reporting by the media?''
Instead, Young launched an investigation into Interior Department officials who attempted to draw attention to what's going on -- and in their efforts apparently violated rules against political activity.
When the 1994 elections moved Murkowski and Young into parallel committee chairmanships, the attention focused on what that would mean for Alaska and natural resources policy.
Young, at the helm of the House Resources Committee, and Murkowski, at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, had virtually identical authority over federal lands. Like a well-oiled seesaw, they teamed up against Forest Service timber policy, attacked the Clinton administration for not pursuing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and excoriated federal land managers for driving the public off public lands.
But their committees also share jurisdiction over federal territories, and that's where the two chairmen often react differently to political pressures.
Young has been a strong advocate of statehood for Puerto Rico, for example, and is treated like a hero when he travels there. But his legislation to permit a statehood vote, though narrowly approved in March 1998 on a 209-208 vote, proved to be a political embarrassment for Republicans who voted 3-to-1 against the Young bill. In the Senate, Murkowski held hearings that produced no legislation on arranging a vote for Puerto Ricans, but he was protected by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who said there wouldn't be time to consider it anyway.
The Northern Mariana Islands are another political lightning rod. House leaders like assistant majority leader Dick Armey and Republican Whip Tom DeLay are adamantly opposed to any changes in the federal laws governing the commonwealth, and where others see abuse, they see economic promise.
DeLay told the Washington Post in a recent interview that what's going on in the Mariana Islands ''is a perfect petri dish of capitalism.''
Concern over working conditions in the Northern Mariana Islands dates back at least to the Reagan administration, when Assistant Interior Secretary Richard Montoya wrote the commonwealth's governor, Pedro Tenorio, warning that ''the uncontrolled influx of alien workers'' would inevitably lead to ''social and cultural problems.''
The problems spring from a covenant endorsed by Congress in 1976 that turned a collection of 14 Pacific islands into a commonwealth. Under that deal, the commonwealth was exempted from U.S. immigration and minimum wage laws to help it develop an economy.
The exemption from labor and immigration laws encouraged an explosion in the garment industry. Dozens of plants relocated from China and Korea to Saipan, the largest of the Mariana Islands, and they imported tens of thousands of foreign workers.
Clothing from those factories could be sold duty-free in the United States under a ''Made in the U.S.A.'' label even though it was produced in foreign-owned shops paying low wages to foreign workers who would not be permitted to move to the territory if U.S. immigration laws applied. Many of the immigrants were induced by promises of U.S. citizenship, and many paid thousands of dollars to get there.
Saipan's population has skyrocketed under the deal. The number of non-U.S. citizen residents on Saipan has grown to about 42,000, and they outnumber resident U.S. citizens 4-to-3, according to figures Murkowski entered into the Senate record. By contrast, in 1980 the number of non-U.S. citizen residents for all of the Mariana Islands was 3,753.
Numerous U.S. newspapers, magazines and television networks have reported on the living conditions of the immigrant workers.
A Feb. 15, 1999, article in Insight, a magazine published by the conservative Washington Times newspaper, reported how the People's Republic of China was ''using its own citizens and other Asians -- working under slave-labor conditions and being paid slave-labor wages -- to produce and ship mountains of apparel and other goods to the United States at cutthroat prices.''
Murkowski aides said that when the senator traveled to the Northern Mariana Islands to investigate the conditions, he was struck by the story of a Bangladeshi security guard at a hut outside a garment factory. The guard produced a number of paychecks that had been rejected at the bank, and showed the senator his shack that had a toilet but no indoor plumbing for it to be connected to.
Murkowski displayed photographs of that trip when he spoke on the Senate floor in February. He said he was concerned enough about conditions there that he held a hearing and was ''assured conditions would improve.''
But they didn't, he said. The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform visited the Northern Mariana Islands in July 1997 and reported problems ''ranging from bureaucratic inefficiencies to labor abuses to an unsustainable economic, social and political system that is antithetical to most American values.''
These abuses could have been prevented had Congress imposed U.S. immigration laws on the commonwealth, Murkowski said. Foreign workers would not have flooded Saipan, and the local economy wouldn't have been monopolized by foreign garment factories.
Murkowski's legislation would begin applying U.S. immigration laws to the islands.
''This bill represents a modest step toward implementing the reforms that are long overdue,'' declared Sen. Jeff Bingaman, the senior Democrat on Murkowski's committee, during the measure's consideration. ''The bill before us is not a controversial bill.''
But not according to Young, who believes the allegations of abuse in the Northern Mariana Islands was made up by Interior Department officials who wanted to elect Democrats to Congress.
''Everything that was ever printed and everything put in the media was very frankly fraudulently represented to the public,'' he said. ''I can't say that in the past under previous governors maybe some of those things didn't occur. But I'd suggest you'd find worse sweat shops in California than you do out there.''
On July 12, Young presided over a committee investigative hearing into the actions of David North, acting policy director of the Interior Department's Office of Insular Affairs.
North worked aggressively to expose abuses in the Northern Mariana Islands and in doing so crossed the line into the political arena when he tried to help Democrats use the issue in races against Republicans, including DeLay.
Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department's inspector general, testified that North violated laws prohibiting political activities by federal employees but that prosecution was precluded by North's resignation.
Among North's activities, according to Devaney, were ''articles about certain Republican congressmen's support of alleged 'sweatshops' in the CNMI, and articles that supported reform legislation in the CNMI.''
The activities also sparked a federal criminal investigation, but federal prosecutors said North will not be charged because there is no evidence that he intended to violate federal laws.
''This committee must not, and will not, turn its back on its duty to oversee the activities of officials at the Interior Department, particularly when there are specific and credible allegations they are using the resources authorized by this committee, for partisan and inappropriate resources,'' Young declared.
But Rep. George Miller, the senior Democrat on Young's committee, said in his own zealous pursuit of wrongdoing at the Interior Department, Young is turning a blind eye to the abuses in the Northern Mariana Islands.
''We're the only entity that goes to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and comes back with an entirely different situation,'' Miller said.
''It's a deplorable situation in the Northern Mariana Islands,'' Miller said. ''There are human rights abuses, human bondage, forced prostitution, forced abortion . . . people who have paid huge amounts of money to get there and then are abused.
''This committee can't find the time to deal with that situation,'' Miller charged. ''The Senate has dealt with it, and yet we can't even get a hearing on this.''
Asked later how he and Murkowski could reach entirely different conclusions about what's going on in the Mariana Islands, Young replied: ''I am not going to second-guess any senator.
''He can do what he wishes to do. But I know what I believe in, what I have seen and taken the time to study.''
