Northern Mariana Islands CNMI

The Northern Mariana Islands, north of Guam, passed from Spain to Germany in 1899 and to Japan after World War I. American forces captured Saipan and Tinian in 1944, and Tinian became the base from which the atomic bombing missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were flown. In 1947 the islands became part of the United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, administered by the United States. Rather than join neighboring islands in seeking independence, the Northern Marianas negotiated a closer relationship with the United States.

The Covenant to Establish a Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Political Union with the United States was approved by 78 percent of voters in a 1975 plebiscite and signed into law on March 24, 1976. The commonwealth government, with an elected governor and bicameral legislature, began in 1978, and residents became U.S. citizens when the trusteeship ended in 1986. The covenant can be changed only with the consent of both governments, and it restricts land ownership to people of Northern Marianas descent.

For years the commonwealth controlled its own immigration and minimum wage, attracting a garment industry and foreign workers that drew investigations into labor abuses in the 1990s. Federal immigration law was extended to the islands in 2009, and the same year they elected their first nonvoting delegate to the House. The economy depends heavily on tourism, much of it from Asia, and was hit hard by the closure of the garment industry and by the COVID-19 pandemic. Typhoon Yutu, among the strongest storms ever to hit U.S. soil, caused severe damage in 2018.