Officials from the Northern Mariana Islands told United States federal agencies this month that the self-governing US territory is losing about 1,000 people a year because there are no economic opportunities at home. On a population of fewer than 45,000, that is roughly 2.2 percent of its people leaving annually. Scaled to the 884,887 residents the Fiji Bureau of Statistics counted at the 2017 census, the same rate would take close to 20,000 Fijians out of the country every year — a Fiji News calculation from the figures reported on 30 September by RNZ from an Interagency Regional Convening in San Francisco.
Why a Fiji outlet is running this: the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is working through in public the exact sequence Fijian economists and employers argue about — workers leave, the private sector contracts, the tax base contracts with it, and the government runs out of room. What differs is the shock absorber. Fiji has remittances and structured labour-mobility schemes. On the account CNMI officials gave in San Francisco, the CNMI has neither.
Key facts from the convening
- The CNMI is averaging a loss of about 1,000 residents a year, BJ Nicholas — policy adviser for military affairs in the Office of the Governor — told the convening, attributing it entirely to a lack of opportunity.
- The territory’s population is under 45,000, according to RNZ. The US Census Bureau’s 2020 Island Areas Census counted 47,329.
- Nicholas said financial insolvency, once only a topic of discussion, is now a potential reality.
- Tourism, historically the main economic driver, needs about 500,000 visitors a year to be viable and is seeing about 100,000 this year, said Matthew Deleon Guerrero, senior policy adviser to Northern Marianas Delegate Kimberlyn King-Hinds.
- The delegation raised infrastructure, utilities, healthcare, disaster resilience, federal grant access and the Commonwealth’s role in US security strategy in the Indo-Pacific.
- Governor David Apatang did not attend; he is finalising the Commonwealth’s fiscal year 2027 budget.
The mechanism: a tax base draining faster than it can be replaced
Nicholas’s argument to federal officials was not that the CNMI is poor. It was that the arithmetic of a small jurisdiction breaks down once out-migration becomes structural. Each departing worker takes a payroll, a rent payment and a set of consumer transactions with them. The private sector thins; revenue thins behind it. He questioned how the Commonwealth would maintain a government at all without that base — which is how a labour-market story becomes a solvency story.
Deleon Guerrero, who advises the territory’s delegate to the US Congress, was blunter. “There is no economy in the CNMI,” he told the convening, as quoted by RNZ, describing rapid out-migration and what he called incredible rates of people leaving. His tourism figures are the clearest measure of the hole: roughly one-fifth of the arrivals officials say the sector needs, with next year expected to be lower again. That is the part Pacific tourism ministries should sit with — not a bad year, but a stated expectation of a worse one.
The status of CNMI residents makes the leak harder to plug than in a sovereign state. They are US citizens who can move to Guam, Hawaii or the mainland without a visa, a job offer or a quota. There is no application queue acting as a brake, and nothing in the RNZ account suggests money flows back the other way in any measured volume.
How Fiji actually compares
| Measure | Northern Mariana Islands | Fiji |
|---|---|---|
| Population | 47,329 at the 2020 Census (US Census Bureau); officials now say under 45,000 | 884,887 at the 2017 census (Fiji Bureau of Statistics) |
| Stated annual population loss | About 1,000 a year, or roughly 2.2% (CNMI officials via RNZ) | No single official headline annual net-migration loss is published in the same form |
| Visitor arrivals | About 100,000 this year against about 500,000 needed for viability (CNMI officials via RNZ) | Pre-pandemic peak of roughly 894,000 in 2019; arrivals have recovered to the high hundreds of thousands since borders reopened (Fiji Bureau of Statistics) |
| Remittances | Not addressed in the RNZ report | Personal inflows above F$1 billion a year in recent years, now one of Fiji’s largest foreign-exchange earners alongside tourism (Reserve Bank of Fiji) |
| Migration and labour status | US commonwealth; residents are US citizens with unrestricted movement to Guam, Hawaii and the mainland; replacement workers need capped CW-1 permits | Sovereign state; departures shaped by visas and by Australian and New Zealand labour-mobility schemes |
Two things stand out. First, scale: Fiji has roughly twenty times the CNMI’s population but receives something closer to eight or nine times its current visitor numbers, which is why a single soft season hurts Saipan far more than it hurts Nadi. Second, and more important, the return flow. Fiji’s departures are substantially monetised — money comes back through remittance channels the Reserve Bank of Fiji tracks and reports. Nothing equivalent appears in the CNMI’s account of its own outflow, which is why its officials describe departures purely as loss.
That does not make Fiji safe. Remittances are a transfer to households, not to the Treasury, and they do not restore a nurse to a ward or a teacher to a classroom. Fiji’s exposure runs through the same cost-of-living channel that determines how much the diaspora can afford to send home — Fiji News has been tracking the cost-of-living pressure on Fijians living abroad. A Fijian household’s remittance income and an Australian mortgage rate are now part of the same equation.
Background: this risk has been flagged before
The CNMI’s fragility was not discovered in a San Francisco meeting room. The US Government Accountability Office has published repeatedly on the territory since Congress extended federal immigration law to it in 2008, and that body of GAO work identifies the same two structural weaknesses Nicholas described: a revenue base narrowly dependent on tourism, and a workforce dependent on foreign labour admitted under the capped, CNMI-only CW-1 transitional permit. The Commonwealth also has fiscal precedent — its public employee pension fund sought US bankruptcy court protection in 2012, a case dismissed on eligibility grounds rather than restructured.
Fiji News links the GAO collection rather than a single study because neither RNZ’s account nor the delegation cited a specific report, and we have not obtained a GAO assessment of the insolvency scenario raised at this convening. The proximate causes of the tourism collapse — pandemic border closures that ended charter traffic from north Asia, and damage left by Super Typhoon Yutu in 2018 — are matters of public record, but the delegation did not, in RNZ’s report, apportion the shortfall between them.
Federal funding, disasters and the Indo-Pacific
Nicholas asked agencies to review the statutes governing their grant programmes to establish whether the CNMI is even eligible, saying officials had previously found programmes from which the territory had been left out. He cited the Port of Saipan potentially competing with Oakland and Los Angeles to illustrate how a jurisdiction of 45,000 fares when bidding against major US metropolitan economies. The disaster-resilience thread is the one with the most direct Fijian parallel: small administrations lose access to money not only on merit but on paperwork and measurement capacity. The CNMI is arguing eligibility rules; Fiji has been arguing evidence thresholds. Both reduce to the capacity to prove a claim.
Apatang, who stayed behind for budget work, said the Commonwealth’s objective is a federal partnership that is stronger and more responsive to the realities of its remote location, limited infrastructure, exposure to natural disasters and its responsibilities as a US territory, according to RNZ.
Sourcing note and open questions
RNZ is the sole source for the convening, the quotes and every CNMI official figure above; the 2020 population count is the US Census Bureau’s. The Fiji comparisons draw on previously published Fiji Bureau of Statistics census and visitor-arrival data and Reserve Bank of Fiji remittance reporting, given as rounded orders of magnitude rather than precise annual totals. The 2.2 percent and 20,000 scaling figures are Fiji News’s arithmetic, labelled as such rather than official projections. Fiji News has not obtained an independent account from the CNMI Governor’s office or from Delegate King-Hinds’s congressional office, both of which publish their own releases, and will update if either does.
Still unanswered: how federal agencies responded in the room; whether any funding, eligibility or grant-law changes were offered; when the CNMI expects an answer; and what the fiscal year 2027 budget assumes about next year’s visitor numbers.
Related Fiji News coverage
- Methamphetamine harm in the Northern Marianas — and the Fijian data gap (we previously covered the territory from published frontline accounts, not on the ground)
- Weather-data gaps that could hold up Fiji’s climate payouts
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the Northern Marianas’ population loss compare with Fiji’s?
CNMI officials describe a loss of about 1,000 people a year from a population they now put under 45,000 — roughly 2.2 percent annually, Fiji News’s own calculation from the figures RNZ reported. The US Census Bureau counted 47,329 residents in the CNMI at the 2020 Island Areas Census, so the officials’ current figure implies the territory has already shed several thousand people since that count. Applied to the 884,887 residents the Fiji Bureau of Statistics counted at the 2017 census, a 2.2 percent rate would be close to 20,000 Fijians a year. Fiji does not publish a single headline annual net-migration loss in the same form, so this is a scaling exercise, not a like-for-like official statistic.
What is the CW-1 programme, and why does it matter to the CNMI’s economy?
CW-1 is the Commonwealth-Only Transitional Worker permit, a CNMI-specific category created after the US Congress extended federal immigration law to the territory in 2008 and later extended into the late 2020s by follow-up legislation. Permits are employer-sponsored, numerically capped and valid only in the Commonwealth, which means hotels, construction firms and healthcare providers cannot simply hire replacements for departing residents at will. That is the structural difference behind the officials’ warning: the CNMI loses citizens who can leave without permission, and backfills them with workers who need a permit, a sponsor and a quota slot.
Has the CNMI faced an insolvency scare before this convening?
Yes, on the pension side. The Commonwealth’s public employee retirement fund sought US bankruptcy court protection in 2012 — reported at the time as one of the first such filings by a public pension system in the United States — and the case was dismissed on eligibility grounds rather than resolved through a restructuring. That episode is the reason BJ Nicholas’s line about insolvency moving from discussion to potential reality carries weight with federal officials: the territory has already tested whether bankruptcy protection is even available to it.
Why is a Fiji news site covering a US territory’s budget problems?
Because the CNMI is running, in public and in miniature, the sequence Fijian policymakers argue about: workers leave, the private sector shrinks, the tax base shrinks, and government services come under pressure. The CNMI has no remittance cushion in the account its officials gave, while Fiji does. That contrast isolates what remittances and labour-mobility schemes actually buy Fiji — and what they do not, since remittances reach households rather than the Treasury.
Is the CNMI’s tourism outlook expected to improve next year?
No. Matthew Deleon Guerrero told the convening that next year’s visitor numbers would be lower again, RNZ reported, and said the trajectory was moving farther and farther away from viability. On the figures given — about 100,000 arrivals this year against about 500,000 needed — the sector is running at roughly one-fifth of what officials say it requires.
