Opinion ID: 112565
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Title VII states:

Text: It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer. . . to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. 42 U. S. C. § 2000e-2(a)(1). Under the statute, [t]he term `employer' means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees, § 2000e(b); [t]he term `commerce' means trade, traffic, commerce, transportation, transmission, or communication among the several States; or between a State and any place outside thereof. . . . § 2000e(g). These terms are broad enough to encompass discrimination by United States employers abroad. Nothing in the text of the statute indicates that the protection of an individual from employment discrimination depends on the location of that individual's workplace; nor does anything in the statute indicate that employers whose businesses affect commerce between a State and any other place outside thereof are exempted when their discriminatory conduct occurs beyond the Nation's borders. While conceding that it is plausible to infer from the breadth of the statute's central prohibition that Congress intended Title VII to apply extraterritorially, ante, at 250, the majority goes to considerable lengths to show that this language is not sufficient to overcome the majority's clear-statement conception of the presumption against extraterritoriality. However, petitioners claim no moreand need claim no more, given additional textual evidence of Congress' intent  than that this language is consistent with a legislative expectation that Title VII apply extraterritorially, a proposition that the majority does not dispute. Confirmation that Congress did in fact expect Title VII's central prohibition to have an extraterritorial reach is supplied by the so-called alien exemption provision. The alien-exemption provision states that Title VII shall not apply to an employer with respect to the employment of aliens outside any State.  42 U. S. C. § 2000e-1 (emphasis added). [3] Absent an intention that Title VII apply outside any State, Congress would have had no reason to craft this extraterritorial exemption. And because only discrimination against aliens is exempted, employers remain accountable for discrimination against United States citizens abroad. The inference arising from the alien-exemption provision is more than sufficient to rebut the presumption against extraterritoriality. Compare Pennsylvania v. Union Gas Co., 491 U. S. 1 (1989). In Union Gas, we considered the question whether Congress had stated with sufficient clarity its intention to abrogate the States' Eleventh Amendment immunity under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. Based on a limited exemption provision directed at the States, we concluded that Congress had spoken with sufficient clarity; absent a background understanding that the general terms of the statute had made the States amenable to suit, we explained, the limited exemption would [have] be[en] unnecessary. Id., at 8. If this logic is sufficiently sharp to pierce the dense armor afforded the States by the clear-statement abrogation rule of Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S., at 242-243; accord, Dellmuth v. Muth, 491 U. S., at 230, then the same logic necessarily overcomes the much weaker presumption against extraterritoriality recognized in Foley Brothers. The history of the alien-exemption provision confirms the inference that Congress expected Title VII to have extraterritorial application. As I have explained, the Court in Foley Brothers declined to construe the Eight Hour Law to apply extraterritorially in large part because of [t]he absence of any distinction between citizen and alien labor under the Law: Unless we were to read such a distinction into the statute we should be forced to conclude . . . that Congress intended to regulate the working hours of a citizen of Iran who chanced to be employed on a public work of the United States in that foreign land. . . . An intention so to regulate labor conditions which are the primary concern of a foreign country should not be attributed to Congress in the absence of a clearly expressed purpose. 336 U. S., at 286. The language comprising the alien-exemption provision first appeared in an employment-discrimination bill introduced only seven weeks after the Court decided Foley Brothers, see H. R. 4453, 81st Cong., 1st Sess. (1949), and was clearly aimed at insulating that legislation from the concern that prevented the Court from adopting an extraterritorial construction of the Eight Hour Law. The legislative history surrounding Title VII leaves no doubt that Congress had extraterritorial application in mind when it revived the alien-exemption provision from the earlier antidiscrimination bill: In section 4 of the Act, a limited exception is provided for employers with respect to employment of aliens outside of any State . . . . The intent of [this] exemption is to remove conflicts of law which might otherwise exist between the United States and a foreign nation in the employment of aliens outside the United States by an American enterprise.  H. R. Rep. No. 570, 88th Cong., 1st Sess. 4 (1963) (emphasis added), reprinted in Civil Rights, Hearings on H. R. 7152, as amended, before Subcommittee No. 5 of the Committee on the Judiciary, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., 2303 (Civil Rights Hearings). [4] See also S. Rep. No. 867, 88th Cong., 2d Sess., 11 (1964) (Exempted from the bill are . . . U. S. employers employing citizens of foreign countries in foreign lands  (emphasis added)). Notwithstanding the basic rule of construction requiring courts to give effect to all of the statutory language, see Reiter v. Sonotone Corp., 442 U. S. 330, 339 (1979), the majority never advances an alternative explanation of the alien-exemption provision that is consistent with the majority's own conclusion that Congress intended Title VII to have a purely domestic focus. The closest that the majority comes to attempting to give meaning to the alien-exemption provision is to identify without endorsement two alternative raisons d'être for that language offered by respondents. Ante, at 254. Neither of these explanations is even minimally persuasive. The first is the suggestion that the alien-exemption provision indicates, by negative implication, merely that aliens are covered by Title VII if they are employed in the United States. This construction hardly makes sense of the statutory language as a whole; indeed, it hardly makes sense. Under respondents' construction of the statute, no one  neither citizen nor alien  is protected from discrimination abroad. Thus, in order to credit respondents' interpretation of the alien-exemption provision, we must attribute to Congress a decision to enact a completely superfluous exemption solely as a means of signaling its intent that aliens be protected from employment discrimination in this Nation. In addition to being extremely improbable, such a legislative subterfuge would have been completely unnecessary, for as we indicated in Espinoza v. Farah Mfg. Co., 414 U. S. 86 (1973), Congress clearly communicated its intent to cover aliens working in this country by prohibiting discrimination against any individual. See id., at 95. Respondents' second explanation is that Congress included the alien-exemption provision in anticipation that courts would otherwise construe Title VII to apply to companies employing aliens in United States possessions, an outcome supposedly dictated by this Court's decision in Vermilya-Brown Co. v. Connell, 335 U. S. 377 (1948). This explanation may very well be true, but it only corroborates the conclusion that Congress expected Title VII to apply extraterritorially. Although there is no fixed legal meaning for the term possession, see id., at 386, it is clear that possessions, like foreign nations, are extraterritorial jurisdictions to which the presumption against extraterritorial application of a statute attaches. See Foley Bros., supra, at 285. [5] Because only one rule of construction applies to both types of jurisdiction, a court following Vermilya-Brown and Foley Brothers would have reached the same conclusion about the applicability of Title VII to companies employing aliens in possessions and to companies employing aliens in foreign nations. Consequently, if Congress believed that the alien-exemption provision was necessary to protect employers in the former class, it would have had just as much reason to believe that the provision was necessary to protect employers in the latter. In any case, the specific history surrounding the alien-exemption provision makes clear that Congress had the situation of U. S. employers employing citizens of foreign countries in foreign lands  firmly in mind when it enacted that provision. S. Rep. No. 867, supra, at 11 (emphasis added).