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June 6th, 2010 
James Peters Yesterday I came across an article about an “English-only” law Tennessee passed just last week. My first reaction was similar to when I first heard of the Arizona immigration law, which is that it clearly violates federal law, will be struck down by the courts in short order, and is really nothing more than a political ploy to seem tough on immigration policy.
Most past legislation along these lines has tried to either require English-only in places of employment or allowed employers to require their employees to speak English. Conservative California legislators made a half-hearted attempt at passing such a law a few years ago without gaining much traction.
As we have pointed out in the past, such laws are invalid because they violate Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which specifically prohibits such policies unless there is an actual “business necessity” for them. For example, a nurse could be required to speak only English to a doctor during surgery. However, upon further examination I discovered that the Tennessee bill does not even try to defy federal law.
The Tennessee bill is an example of the worst kind of law: one that has no valid purpose except to pick on a minority group. All the law does is restate the Title VII language that allows such a policy only where there is a “business or safe workplace necessity” for it.
The law waters down its language even further by stating that an employer cannot require English-only when an employee is on a break or talking to co-workers. Essentially, the law can be re-stated as follows: “Employers can require an employee to speak English, but only if it is necessary for them to do so”.
In short, all the Tennessee law does is restate federal law, but in a deceptive way. Instead of saying that English-only policies are illegal except where justified by business necessity, it purports to give employers permission (or even encourage them) to create such policies if necessary, which likely is not a problem to begin with and employers are already free to do under federal law.
All states in this country are in the middle of a fiscal crisis that is putting their legislatures’ budgetary skills to the test. There are not enough hours in the day for most of them to come up with solutions to their states’ most pressing problems. However, Tennessee’s legislature apparently decided that writing and passing a law that has no legal affect on anyone whatsoever, but instead tries to ostracize those who either do not speak English or have difficulty doing so. That is just mean.
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Keep all of the Illegals in your state then and see how well you do ! All of the idiots that come here and decide to keep speaking their native tounges, you house them all and be happy then !