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>The right to housing .. The right of access to any place or service intended for use by the general public, such as transport hotels, restaurants, cafes, theatres and parks. The right of access and the right to housing are not affected. The police will not evict a person of colour from a rented accommodation, and will not assist a shop owner with kicking out a person of colour from their shop. But a right is not an entitlement. In order to rent a private room or buy something in a private shop, both parties should agree. Again, quoting the convention, "equality before the law". A business owner is not a representative of the law. The police and the civil servants treat everyone equally. >In where you live, and where you used to live, a business can refuse service to a minority group? A private business can refuse anyone. That's because it is private. "The transaction is not seen as profitable." The most popular reason for refusal though is not race, origin, or citizenship, it's not having an app to pay for the service, because most small businesses don't bother accepting cash any more. The government is theoretically trying to deal with this issue by running propaganda campaigns "accept cash!", but I think the battle is lost. >Real ID is a US-only issue, so I interpreted "If you are worried that your tenant might happen to be an illegal migrant" in the US context. Yes, I got confused, apologies.
I still don't see why the US cannot just issue passports to all citizens, and treat a passport as a universal ID (or mandate that all state-issued IDs be universally recognized), but it's unrelated to the "Real ID". |
The US used to use this logic until around 1960. It was a horrible country, at least if you were black. Even if a white person wanted to offer housing to black people, the white person was discriminated against. Collective private action used to reinforce a white supremacist social structure.
That's why we needed laws to require public services be available without discrimination based on race, religion, and various other protected classes.
"A private business can refuse anyone. That's because it is private."
A business may be privately owned while doing business with the public. That is quite different than a privately owned business which operates a private club.
Furthermore, businesses are subject to regulations that private people do not have. This is clear in organization structures like a limited company, where the company is a recognized as being legally distinct from its owners. These companies exist only because the government says so, which means the government can control what they can or cannot do.
It's also clear in places like licensing, where someone cannot simply say "I am a medical doctor" and offer medical services, and in other regulations like food safety, where restaurants -- even privately owned ones -- are held to standards which people don't have when cooking for themselves.