No? If we interpret his intentions generously, he didn't say he only wanted to hire people of Eastern European descent, but people who went through their education system. This can include people from any ethnic group that happens to have people living there. That's like saying it's racial discrimination to only hire people who went to MIT.

A generous interpretation is they were outsourcing the work, and the business wanted it to be outsourced to a company in Eastern Europe.

That's an even more interesting thought when you apply it to one-man bands. If the only employment is someone self-employing, then presumable the client can discriminate in such ways.

I suppose if you try to do it at scale though there are other mechanisms for calling you out on deliberately circumventing the spirit of the law.

> I hope your friend realizes that this is clear-cut racial/ethnicity-based discrimination.

That is absolutely orthogonal to business requirements to be honest.

Especially when you need to establish production of anything as primitive as N95s.

Of course you can send airplanes all around the world for them (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-at-least-tw...) but when they will return empty, that thin reasoning layer will vaporize almost immediately.