The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is redoubling its efforts against English-at-work requirements, targeting once again, of all institutions, the Salvation Army.

This one’s a slow pitch for immigration reformers, and common-sense Americans won’t have trouble figuring out the problem here. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of things like radio host Terry Anderson’s quip that black teenagers in LA can’t land fast-food jobs because they don’t speak Spanish like the rest of the kitchen.

Wouldn’t the same cause of action apply? If my “national origin,” American, means I speak English, aren’t I being discriminated against if I can’t work at the Chinese food joint where everyone speaks Chinese?

Funny, I’m not aware of the EEOC tucking into a case like this. And outside the employment context, how about business accommodations? We never cease to be reminded of the segregated lunch counters of the South, now illegal. But what about when I try asking for directions at the gas station in New Jersey where none of the turban-wearing attendants speak a word of English?

Aren’t I essentially being refused service on national-origins grounds? Patriotic plaintiffs’ attorneys out there, sharpen your pencils. You could be making some big bucks off the immigration invasion.

It would have been better, for Luis Martinez, had he been named Horace, Sven or Ngogodo instead. But, as with so many of the arrivals from Latin America, he’s got a first and last name that appear and reappear with tiresome regularity, and apparently more often than in the Anglo world (and as a David Wilson, I should know). See They put wrong Luis in prison | [Bronx] man’s 9-day ordeal as he’s mistaken for robber[ By Chrisena Coleman And Leo Standora Daily News April 24th 2007. }This sort of thing has happened before in New York, and likely will again.

In saner cultural settings, it might have been resolved more quickly: smoother communication, keener senses of difference by police and bureaucrats, etc. But in outsize, polyglot, grind ‘em-up- and-spit-’em out New York, no dice.

And if anyone’s tempted to think that the foreign names flooding us really add “diversity,” check out the civil and criminal files in New York for subjects named “Amadou Diallo” – and see just how often, besides the famous one, a fellow with this particular name shows up.

Bigger question: is all this (non)diversity really making America a better place to live?

A half-hearted congratulations to the Washington Post for noticing
that black Americans are hurt by immigration: [See Patrick Cleburne's Can Only Hispanics Do Yard Work?]

Though it’s with great disappointment that we realize how this story came to see the light of day. According to well-established journalistic standards, something that hurts Americans generally is not news. Something that hurts white Americans generally is certainly not news. But if black Americans–or any other protected-status group–is hurt, then by God, it’s news.

Someone should be pressing the Post — and the rest of the MSM — on why whites as a group never merit coverage, except as un-quoted backdrops responsible in some vague way for all that plagues the world. (Racist Assumptions Widen Achievement Gap, or Credit Scores Used to Deny African-Americans Access to Financial Services) Never are they a living, breathing group of people with something to say about what’s happening to them.

The U.S. Supreme Court dispensed a smidgen of common sense in 2002 with a ruling that illegal aliens could not recover lost wages because, well, they could not have legally earned them in the first place.

However, in direct defiance of that ruling, an appellate court in New York has ruled that illegal aliens can collect back wages at their home country’s rate. [Sanango v 200 E. 16th St. Hous. Corp.]

A jury handed Arcenio Sanango, an Ecuadoran illegal who fell from a ladder at a Manhattan worksite, $96,000 in lost earnings, both past and future. The award in U.S. dollars couldn’t be upheld, the appellate judges acknowledged, so they remanded for a recalculation based on the Ecuadoran pay scale.

“We are unaware… of any federal policy that would be offended by awarding an undocumented alien damages for lost earnings based on the prevailing wage in the alien’s country of origin,” wrote Justice David Friedman.

Uh, how about that big one that says illegal aliens aren’t supposed to be here to begin with?

But here’s an idea: By the same token, are illegal aliens who commit crimes in America entitled to “home country” criminal procedure?

If so, we could get confessions with a bullwhip.