Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor...

The young Chinese woman believed she had come to America. But how could this be the American Dream? Li Li, 26, found herself working 18-hour days in a factory cutting textiles. At night she and 700 other workers were locked up in company barracks infested with rats and equipped with just one outside toilet for every 50 people. The residents were allowed out only on Sundays for a maximum of one hour. When she complained about conditions, according to her account, she and another female worker were beaten by factory foremen wielding heavy dressmaking scissors.

Welcome to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, a chain east of the Philippines. And, yes, it has been a U.S. territory since the end of World War II. Li Li is one of 40,000 foreign contract workers, mostly from China, Bangladesh and the Philippines, shipped in to service a garment industry that exploits Saipan's exemption from a number of American labor and immigration controls. This allows the garment factories, most run by Chinese or South Korean firms, to pay foreign laborers substantially less than the minimum wage but still export nearly $1 billion worth of clothes annually to American markets--patriotically stamped MADE IN THE USA and free of duties and quotas that apply to products made in China and Korea.

Li Li is attempting to sue her former employer, SR (Saipan) Corp., for the assault on her and for unpaid overtime. "The managers did not treat us like human beings," she says, adding that she would not have gone to Saipan if she had known what the working conditions were like. But having borrowed the equivalent of $2,800 to pay the "recruitment fee" in China, she cannot return until she has earned at least enough to pay off the loan. "That comes close to the definition of indentured labor," says Allen Stayman, insular-affairs director at the U.S. Department of the Interior, who is pressuring the Northern Marianas to clean up sweatshop practices or face a federal takeover of immigration and labor controls. "The local immigration and labor departments are essentially organized crime," says Stayman. "It is one big scam." So big that foreign laborers outnumber natives 40,000 to 28,000.

President Clinton sent a letter last May to the islands' Governor, complaining that the labor practices "are inconsistent with our country's values." Last week a bipartisan congressional commission on immigration released a scathing report that said, "Only a few countries, and no democratic society, have immigration policies" like Saipan's. Representative George Miller, a Democrat from California who has sponsored legislation that would end Saipan's exemptions, visited the island two weeks ago and said he was "deeply troubled" by conditions.