History teaches the contrary. An examination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or of India to name just two should end the debate. The idea that a multilingual nation is stronger than any nation with a common tongue is fatuous. Even Switzerland has problems in this regard, Canada certainly does to name to Western democracies without considering problems in countries such as India or China.
So we see the triumph of ideology over reality. The Obama administration if nothing else is the prisoner of its own ideology. But the false assumptions which underlie this ideology are frightening: Discriminating on the basis of language fluency is the equivalent of unlawfully discriminating based on race or ethnicity. But language fluency is not a product of DNA, race is. Concededly there is overlap between language fluency and race but language fluency is an accident of culture not genes. The speaker has the power to change his language but not his skin color. Nevertheless, the Obama ideology says that government has the right to deny employers the liberty to manage their business in order to advance the ideological goal of language diversity.
Make no mistake about it, to deny anyone the right to discriminate is to deny that person liberty. We have concluded as a society that discriminating on the basis of race or gender is so harmful that he cannot be tolerated. In other words, an employer may think it rational but we prohibit discrimination based on sex, age, religion, ethnicity and race.
The rationale for these laws is that the discrimination is irrational as well as harmful. It is irrational because it assumes that every member of a class always behaves in a manner consistent with the stereotype of that class. Thus, if we fail to hire members of a given race because we think those people are shiftless, feckless, or dangerous, we might be right in our judgment as far as a statistical majority of that race is concerned. But the stereotype will never apply to 100% of the individuals in the race. There will always be individuals who break free of the stereotype, just as I intend someday to prove on the dance floor.
So from a sociologist's or a statistician's point of view, discrimination based on race is irrational. But it might not be irrational from a business point of view. If, for example, an employer believes that one race that is statistically more prone to crime than another, an easy way to eliminate a source of employee crime is to avoid hiring individuals of that race. It's a very cheap screening process which, although not perfect, reduces risk at no apparent cost to the employer except perhaps a need in missed opportunity costs because he passed over a superior individual who performs counter to the stereotype. There may be other very rational reasons for employers to commit racial discrimination such as customer acceptance, and co-employee acceptance, to name a couple. But the law prohibits this kind of discrimination.
The law prohibits it ostensibly because politicians have calculated that the harm done to the individuals so stereotyped, whether rightly or wrongly, far outweighs any advantage devolving to employers who practice discrimination. This is a judgment call, a value call, made by politicians and imposed on society. The politicians have said: we arrogate unto ourselves the sole right to make this judgment and forbid you from making this very same judgment on penalty of criminal sanctions. We do not care whether your business sense tells you it is rational for you to discriminate based on race, we tell you that the societal cost is too high; our value trumps your value; nor do we care that we are depriving you of liberty when we deprive you of the right or power to discriminate; as a matter of fact, politicians will routinely say that there is no liberty to discriminate based on race because the act is so heinous. Again, this is a value judgment. When the emotion is wrung out of the issue, we must concede that the liberty of the employer is sacrificed to accommodate a more favored value.
So the ideology of the Obama administration says that it is entitled to deprive business owners of the liberty to discriminate in hires on the basis of an ability to speak English. This assumes that this fluency somehow equates to sex, age, religion, ethnicity or race. Even assuming overlap, this proposition is preposterous.
More, the businessman who discriminate on the basis of language fluency can claim that he is doing so for a compelling business purpose. People who do not speak English simply cannot function where English fluency is necessary to job performance. This is not a haphazard outcome but a certain outcome. There is a perfectly rational business purpose in this discrimination. Indeed, real physical danger on many job sites can result from language misunderstandings and employees can be maimed or even kill if instructions are misunderstood.
Finally, prohibiting language discrimination is wrong because it advances an illegitimate goal: a polyglot society. It is not within the purview of government to deprive an individual of liberty to achieve this goal. There is an insufficient relationship between language fluency and a legitimate governmental interest connected to race, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference and therefore the government lacks the power to deprive us of liberty.
In fact, it has been historically true that our government has from time immemorial advanced English fluency, that is why we spend billions and billions of dollars from kindergarten through postgraduate studies to advance our ability to communicate in that language. Clearly, facility in English is a desirable and commonly accepted public policy goal and not incidentally a constitutionally permissible goal.
The Obama administration's regulation is not the product of representative government but of bureaucratic government and as such it is undemocratic as well is irrational. Because it is unconstitutional, irrational and undemocratic it is tyrannical. Because every individual has the power to change his language, the imposition is unnecessary as well as tyrannical.
