A Retired Lawyer Says Proposed Laws Protecting English Speakers Make No Sense. But Civil Rights Laws DON’T HAVE TO MAKE SENSE
11/21/2013
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Re: Peter Brimelow’s blog post There Should Be A Law: Unemployed MIT Administrator Denied Job Scrubbing Toilets Because She Doesn't Speak Spanish

From: A Retired Lawyer [Email him]

Yes, they could add the above suggested law to the list of Bozo No-Nos for employers. If so, so what?

It is one thing to sue over one's being fired or laid off from an existing job. It is a practical impossibility for any individual to sue over his or her not being hired for any particular job opening, however, regardless of the prohibited motivation of the would-be employer!

Such a prohibition merely would result in silence as to the actual reason for the refusal to hire an individual— as is already the case for any other prohibited rationale, like age discrimination.

It is a virtual no-lose situation for hiring managers, so long as there is a single qualified candidate that they want to hire, for any particular job, who does not have the undesired "debility" of being monolingual, old, currently unemployed, or whatever else the potential employer happens to loathe in job candidates and employees.

James Fulford writes: All of what our retired lawyer friend says is very sensible, and none of it is true in the topsy-turvy world of anti-discrimination law. For one thing, the employee doesn’t have to sue, that’s handled by either the EEOC (using the employer’s tax dollars) or by an aggrieved ethnic lobby. (Which. in this case, regular Americans who speak English don’t have—yet.)

Second, it’s a regular thing for people to be awarded money for not getting jobs if the judge decides that the employer has discriminated—which includes “disparate impact” complaints, in which members of a minority group actually score lower on objective tests, and so the Judge says the test is wrong.

Steve Sailer has pointed out that a minority who fails a New York Fire Department test, is in effect

buying a very, very long-lived lottery ticket.

If the damages in Vulcan Society [A case where an aggrieved ethnic lobby suing New York City]are set at, say, $20 million, the contingency fee lawyers will presumably grab about $7 million, and several hundred or more black and Hispanic test-takers who came close enough on the test so that they would have been hired if there had been no disparate impact will get checks in the mail adding up to $13 million.

So yes, of course it makes no sense, but it happens all the time. All Peter Brimelow suggested is that is should apply to discrimination against regular Americans, as well.

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