Arizona Bans Multilingual Requirement for Businesses

My rant yesterday about The Melting Pot Being Broken ties right in to this story. One of the requirements for legal immigration is to know the language. Obviously the optometrist, fearful of another type of suit, did the right thing but suffered for a year while this cleared the courts, not to mention the costs.

The State of Arizona also had to waste their time and money enacting this bill to protect against this travesty.

The legal system is broken. One candidate for office here in SC is promoting "you lose a frivolous suit, you pay all costs for everyone". I would go one step further, make the "ambulance chaser" lawyer pay a matching amount to the winning defendant.

Excerpt: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) signed legislation affirming that nothing in state law requires businesses to provide “trained and competent” interpreters when a customer comes in speaking a language other than English. Assistant Attorney General Michael Walker said that has probably always been the law.

If it was always the law, why the need for this law? Because of a lawsuit of course. A unilingual Spanish speaking woman in Arizona was treated by a unilingual English speaking optometrist in his Arizona office. The woman’s underage 12 year old daughter offered to be the interpreter; fearing legal, insurance and medical problems if the child misunderstood the optometrist refused, asking the mother and child to return with an English speaker over 18 or alternatively, visit some Spanish speaking optometrists. Instead, the Spanish speaker, whether legally in this country or not, understood enough of this country to file a discrimination suit against the English speaking optometrist. Refusing to settle, the optometrist finally won after the Arizona Attorney General took a year to decide no laws had been broken.

But the lawsuit and the trouble it caused the optometrist, Dr. Schrolucke, pushed him to reach out to Sen. John Huppenthal, R-Chandler, who agreed to sponsor what he called “clarifying language” to the state’s civil rights law. Arizona Bans Multilingual Requirement for Businesses