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 ant
a good reason for President Bush's tax cuts?
The Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
has $303.8
million to spend this year. That tidy sum will fuel the EEOC's
drive to create a right to language choice in every American workplace
— an effort which now includes the creation of a new EEOC office
in San Juan, Puerto Rico, complete with a 14-member staff.
An EEOC office
in Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico will do wonders to advance the agency's
anti-English agenda, given that English speakers are about as popular
in Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico as they are in French-speaking Quebec.
The Toronto
Star reported
that unlike the United States, Puerto Rico's mind is made up on
language matters:
¡Español
si, ingles no! [Spanish yes, English no.] For a century, that
has been the rallying cry on this largely apolitical isle, the
singularly unifying issue that cuts across race and colour (sic),
ethnicity and ideology.
According to
a 1997 report by the New York Times, "90% of the island's
650,000 public school students lack basic
English skills" (this link requires the free Adobe
Acrobat Reader).
EEOC Chairwoman
Ida Castro,
herself a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico, has been an
outspoken advocate of language rights. At a June, 1999 EEOC hearing
in Houston on discrimination against low-wage workers, Castro complained:
Due to a
lack of education, cultural differences, and language barriers,
too many low-wage workers are unaware of their rights, unfamiliar
with EEOC's charge processing procedures, and unable to get a
fair shot at the American dream (emphasis added).
Castro was
joined at this hearing by the AFL-CIO, the Mexican American Legal
Defense and Education Fund, the Houston Immigration and Refugee
Coalition and Texas Rural Legal Aid. These folks were not likely
to emphasize the value of encouraging low-wage workers to learn
English.
The EEOC swiftly
began an aggressive language-rights litigation effort. An EEOC settlement
with a Chicago manufacturer resulted in a payment of $192,500 to
eight Hispanic former employees. An EEOC lawsuit
against a bankrupt firm, Premier Operator Services, Inc., netted
13 Hispanic employees a record $700,000 in damages. (For the details,
see "How
to Defeat an English-Only Rule."
Last September,
the EEOC boasted
that allegations of "national origin discrimination based on
English-only rules have skyrocketed" from just 77 in 1996 to
365 as of September, 2000. The EEOC's success in enforcing its idiosyncratic
interpretation
of national origin discrimination law is astounding, given that
Congress has never made language choice a protected civil right.
Thankfully,
Congressman Ron
Paul (R., TX) has asked
President Bush to impose a hiring freeze at the EEOC, which would,
among other things, block the proposed San Juan branch office.
Congressman
Paul understands what some of his colleagues do not: A surplus of
money in the government's treasury simply leads to a surfeit of
government regulations.
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