An amusing quip is that with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s presidential-race exit, the 2020 campaign’s gain is NYC’s loss. And sure enough, with him back at work and up to mischief, the Big Apple has just notified residents that it has banned calling someone an “illegal alien” out of hate “in public accommodations, employment, and housing.” It’s all part of a prohibition against discrimination “on the basis of perceived or actual immigration status or national origin.” Presumably, however, it’s still legal to discriminate against conservatives/Trump supporters.
Of course, without “discrimination” — meaning, choosing one or some from among many — against illegal aliens, we couldn’t even deport them. This is perhaps the whole idea, too, as the NYC ban also prohibits calling ICE when motivated by doubleplusungood thoughts.
Reporting on some details, the Metro writes,
A document shared on the nyc.gov reads that, “It is illegal for a person’s employer, coworkers, or housing provider such as landlords to use derogatory or offensive terms to intimidate, humiliate, or degrade people, including by using the term ‘illegal alien,’ where its use is intended to demean, humiliate, or offend another person.”
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Not mentioned was what type of high-tech device or on-retainer telepathist will be used to ascertain an alleged thought criminal’s true motivation.
Additionally, the document reads, “It is illegal for employers to pay workers lower wages or no wages or threaten to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to harass, scare, or intimidate workers because of their immigration status,” the Metro continues.
Interestingly, enforcing this would actually help eliminate illegal migrants from NYC since it would be no cheaper to hire them than citizens. Thus might a cynic conclude that this provision of the law won’t be enforced.
Obviously eager to value signal, NYC tweeted information about the new measure:
BREAKING:
New York City has made it illegal to threaten to call ICE based on a discriminatory motive or to tell someone “go back to your country.” Hate has no place here. pic.twitter.com/8PaIozjQty— City of New York (@nycgov) September 26, 2019
The restrictions, “outlined in a 29-page directive released by City Hall’s Commission on Human Rights,” the New York Post adds, include the statement, “‘Alien’ — used in many laws to refer to a ‘noncitizen’ person — is a term that may carry negative connotations and dehumanize immigrants, marking them as ‘other.’”
Now, first note that the term “illegal alien” appears in federal statutes and has been regularly used by the Supreme Court (and calling an illegal alien an “undocumented worker” is like calling a rapist an undocumented husband).
Aside from deceiving others with language, however, leftists also deceive themselves with illusions. NYC provides a good example, too, when it states, “Hate has no place here” and inveighs against “otherization.” After all, this is the same set that has allowed hate — in the form of Trump Derangement Syndrome — to drive its behavior for years. Its members have labeled the president’s supporters “deplorables,” “bitter clingers,” and “dregs,” and most recently Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) called them “despicable.”
Then there’s Trump supporter Dion Cini, who says he has been denied service by NYC establishments approximately a dozen times; this includes being expelled from a bar that had nonetheless charged his card for the service it wouldn’t provide. So it appears that hate has a prominent place in the Big Apple. Discrimination does, too.
Moreover, consider: If a store owner feels hatred toward a vandal or shoplifter, is he then wrong in reporting the criminal? Since he can do so, however, we should ask: Why is a special prohibition carved out for one particular crime, illegal migration?
This is especially relevant since humans, being emotional creatures, may often pursue even right actions motivated by (at least in part) negative emotions. So does one have to be Mr. Spock to report an illegal in NYC now?
One certainly doesn’t have to be to address cops in New York City now, mind you, as New York’s highet court ruled in 2015 that it was legal to swear long and loud at police officers. Go figure.
But speaking of negative emotion, the Post explained the law’s motivation. “The Commission on Human Rights made clear that the directive is, at least in part, a rebuke of federal crackdowns on illegal [migration],” the paper relates.
Yet speech codes are par for NYC’s course. In 2016, the city announced that it would be illegal for employers and landlords to not use Made-up Sexual Status people’s (“transgenders’”) preferred pronouns, such as “ze,” “sie,” “ey,” “hir,” “zim,” and “eir.” Oh, the penalty for noncompliance includes, again, fines up to $250,000.
These restrictions are motivated by the same spirit that birthed hate-speech laws in the rest of the Western world. In fact, they’re an end run around the First Amendment, the camel’s nose in the free-speech tent. The social engineers hope to slip these speech prohibitions by the courts (with activist “judges’” help) by introducing them within a narrow context: anti-discrimination law constraining only the legal fictions known as “public accommodations.” But state trampling of speech in any context is a step toward state trampling of speech in every context.
Also note: I’ve often warned about entities such as NYC’s Commission on Human Rights. Going by some variation on that name (e.g., “human rights commissions”), these are the bureaucracies that enforce tyrannical hate-speech prohibitions in Europe, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. And here’s the kicker: Having metastasized, it appears that every state has one, and many (if not most) counties and cities do as well. Even deeply conservative West Virginia has one. In other words, the mechanisms for enforcing hate-speech law are already in place.
As for citizens’ place in the pecking order, de Blasio has made this clear. As the Post also reports, on “Thursday the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs announced a joint $1 million investment with the state to guarantee legal services to immigrants facing imminent deportation.”
All this can make it tempting to tell de Blasio to go back to where he came from. Unfortunately for NYC, though, that happens to be Manhattan.
Photo: Cristian Storto Fotografia / iStock / Getty Images Plus
