 Frank Murkowski, then Republican Senator from Alaska and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, submitted a bill to extend the protection of U.S. minimum-wage labor laws to the workers in the CNMI.In testimony before the Senate, it was described that 91% of the private-sector workforce were immigrants, and were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage.Stories also emerged of workers forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks without plumbing.