Hiring Manager Accuses Candidate Of Trying To Get A Job To 'Get To America' — From Puerto Rico, Which Is In America
This HR person is about to get a lesson in geography and employment law at the same time.
Stock 4you | Shutterstock It's pretty easy to be cynical nowadays, but every now and then, you hear a story that is so bang-your-head-against-the-wall ludicrous it really makes you wonder if your cynicism is just… well, realism.
Case in point: a worker's encounter with a hiring manager who is somehow simultaneously bigoted and really, really dumb in a way that feels like a whole new level of "I'm sorry… what?"
A hiring manager accused a man of using his job to get a green card.
While obviously bigoted, this is certainly nothing new. These accusations are leveled all the time, and that climate seems to be manifesting in skyrocketing rates of discrimination complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), where lawsuits were up 50%, and reports were up 25% between 2022 and 2023.
This man might be one of the next people to join that list of complaints and lawsuits. He wrote in his Reddit post that when he recently entered the job market, he hit up a friend for an entry into his company's hiring process. After a lengthy period of silence, he asked his friend to follow up.
The feedback he received confirmed his suspicions. "I suspected I was being discriminated against in my job search and today it was confirmed," he wrote. But it was confirmed in the dumbest way possible.
After even more lengthy silence, the man's friend finally went and tried to nail the hiring manager down about "why I still hadn't received an interview," the man wrote. "The person who he talked to said the following: 'I was hesitant to pursue him because I believe he's going to use us to get to America then quit.'"
The worker is from Puerto Rico — and, hence, a US citizen who doesn't even need a green card.
"I'm American and I live in Puerto Rico," the man pointed out. "I don't need a green card." But wait, it gets stupider. "That's not even how green cards work even if I did need one." And stupider still! "I've lived in the mainland my entire life and only recently came to PR."
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't knowing how green cards work kind of, like, part of an HR person's job? And also, HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW PUERTO RICO IS IN THE U.S.?
There's an entire song about it in "West Side Story" and everything! With the joking lyric, "Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico's in America." We've been chuckling about this SINCE THE 1950s. Steven Spielberg JUST REMADE THE MOVIE IN 2022. Yet here we are!
The man is now wondering if he has a discrimination case.
Of course, this story is more than just dumb. It's also wildly bigoted. "They just saw a Latino name and an unfamiliar location and that was all they needed to see to make their decision," the man wrote, adding, "They didn't even have the decency to even look at my jobs (all of which were in America)."
"I hope your friend recorded that," another Redditor added. "You’ll have a tough time proving discrimination without it." Which is likely true. Crucially, though, testimony from someone with firsthand knowledge of what happened is a form of evidence frequently used by the EEOC to establish discrimination cases. This man definitely has that in his friend, assuming the friend is willing to get involved.
A lawyer piped into the Reddit comments as well to urge this man to file a claim with the EEOC, which is the first step in suing any employer. "The EEOC assigns an investigator who reviews the claim," the lawyer explained. Several others added that since witness testimony is usually a key part of a criminal case, it's just as valid here and definitely worth a try.
People from Puerto Rico said that this deeply idiotic confusion is, unfortunately, very common.
It might be an open question whether this man will be able to have an actual legal case, but what is absolutely not in question is, as one Redditor put it, "how bad our education system is." People genuinely don't know Puerto Rico is a part of the United States. In 2024! "I’m from Canada and even I knew that," another person added.
But several people from Puerto Rico said these mistakes happen constantly. "I was once denied entry to a bar in NY because I had a Puerto Rican driver’s license and was told to come back with my green card," one person wrote. In New York! The mainland state with the biggest Puerto Rican community outside the island itself!
Others pointed out that the state of New Mexico faces similar problems — so much so that New Mexico Magazine has a standing monthly feature in which New Mexicans write in with their latest experience with someone refusing to let them board a plane or buy booze because of their "Mexican" ID.
And of course, this silliness all leads to tons of discrimination in hiring, which people who work in HR said is rampant. Many described experiences working for people who deleted all resumes with Hispanic names — or "foreign-sounding" names of any kind — as well as non-English place names from their lists of candidates.
It's pretty remarkable that so much stupidity and bigotry are so common in our working world. But as another Puerto Rican Redditor put it, "the ignorance of this is annoying, but not surprising."
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.