ALT-3 Why us Employers should Require Employees Speak English
Hell, no! Of course, private business owners should have the ultimate right to hire and fire anyone, but it could be grossly unfair for them to force Hispanic employees to speak English. In a case where the language is important, such as in a doctor's office or retail store, the employer should use some judgment. An employee with limited English skills could be useful if the clientele is mostly Hispanic-speaking. The employer can also require minimum qualifications, such as the new employee must enroll in an English language class.
Of course, it is a whole different situation if the prospective employee is an illegal immigrant, and is showing obviously fake identification. In that case, the employer risks committing a felony by hiring that person, and may rightly feel an obligation to report the job applicant to local authorities.
My European immigrant family experienced some of the same difficulties Hispanic arrivals face in today's America. My mother's mother came to the US as a Russian-Jewish immigrant in 1908. She and her husband had four daughters when they arrived, and two more after they'd settled in Philadelphia.
At the time, the older girls were age 10 (my mother), 12, 14 and 17. None spoke a word of English, but they all immediately went to work in the clothing industry. School? Forget it. The family, living in a two-room tenement apartment, needed the $5 a week each girl could earn. Most of the girls in the "sweat shops" were either newly-arrived Italians or Jews, and employers didn't have any language restrictions. If they had such restrictions at that time, they'd never find enough young immigrant girls to work for such terrible wages.
However, all immigrant families were keenly aware that English was vital for surviving and getting ahead in America, so virtually every young worker took English lessons at night schools, churches and synagogues. Therefore, my personal opinion is that employers, if English is not vital for doing the job, should not discriminate against legal immigrant applicants who don't speak the language.
Further, considerate employers would be doing themselves and their newly-arrived employees a good deed if they'd encourage and help and with the learning of English as quickly as possible.
