During a White House cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that states and municipalities that issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants would risk their federal funding for infrastructure projects.
“We have so many states and municipalities that don’t follow the law,” Duffy said. “So, whether it’s DEI discriminating against Americans, whether they give illegals driver’s licenses or they’re sanctuary cities or states. If you don’t follow the law, if you’re giving licenses to illegals, if you’re having DEI policies, we’re not going to fund your projects.”
“So you’ve got to certify in your state or in your city to get road and bridge money or rail money that you’re actually following the law, which includes the executive orders from you, Mr. President.”
Per Fox News, 19 states and Washington, DC allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses through laws passed. States that allow this include New York, New Jersey, California, and Washington.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said in 2019 after signing legislation allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, “Expanding access to driver’s licenses is critical for the safety of New Jerseyans and a step toward building a stronger and fairer New Jersey for all.” He added, “Allowing residents the opportunity to obtain driver’s licenses regardless of their immigration status will decrease the number of uninsured driver’s and increase safety on our roads. I thank my partners in the Legislature for sending this important bill to my desk.”
This comes as the May 7 deadline for Americans to get REAL IDs looms closer. The requirement, which was passed in 2005 in response to the 9/11 attacks, is a federally-compliant identification that meets higher standards and will be required to board flights. Only legal US citizens or residents can obtain the identification card.
More at:
Reports: Unsafe Foreign Truckers Selling Their Rigs After Trump’s ‘Speak English’ Order
Some foreign truckers are reportedly quitting the industry because President Donald Trump directed deputies Monday to restart the English-language proficiency tests for foreign drivers.
One Spanish-speaking driver told CBS Miami that “it is an awful law,” and added that he has seen many truck drivers putting their trucks on sale.
“The Cuban-American community could be one of the most affected,” said a report from En.Cibercuba.com.
“It is estimated that between 20,000 and 25,000 truck drivers of Cuban origin are active in the United States, many of whom have limited proficiency in English, [and] the requirement to pass an official test could pose an additional hurdle for their job stability,” the site added.
Some industry officials object to Trump’s enforcement of the safety rule that was ended by President Barack Obama’s deputies in 2016.
“I think it is more political propaganda by President Trump,” Rigto Dia, the CEO of Simplex Group, told NBC Miami. He added: “This is going to definitely, in my opinion, create a crisis. There is a driver shortage as it is in the U.S. of 70,000 drivers because the new generation are not coming into the industry.”
Dia’s company is paid to help diverse drivers meet industry licensing and safety rules.
More at:
U.S. Trucking Advocate: Foreign Drivers Causing Fatal Accidents, ‘Slashing Truckers’ Income, Pushing Companies out of Business’
A highway disaster in Texas has exposed the growing number of dangerous foreign truck drivers on U.S. roads, and advocates are using a legislative debate in Arkansas to jump-start federal changes to loopholed trucking regulations.
“We’re trying to make a statement so that the feds will do something,” said Shannon Everett, a cofounder of American Truckers United. The foreign truck drivers — including many illegals — are killing American drivers, slashing truckers’ income, and pushing companies out of business,” he told Breitbart News.
Freight Waves described the March 13 Texas disaster when a truck slammed into the back of a traffic jam:
A man has been arrested as authorities continue to investigate the cause of a crash that killed five people Thursday on Interstate 35 in Austin, Texas.
Authorities said 17 vehicles were involved, including a tractor-trailer hauling goods for Amazon, in the accident that happened around 11:30 p.m. in the southbound lanes of I-35. Five people were pronounced dead on the scene, including a child and an infant. Eleven others were taken to hospitals.
Solomun Weldekeal Araya, 37, the Dallas-based driver of the tractor-trailer, was arrested Friday by the Austin Police Department and charged with five counts of intoxication manslaughter and two counts of intoxication assault.
Fox7Austin.com reported:
The driver was detained and identified as Solomun Weldekeal Araya. The affidavit says he spoke mostly Tigrinya, a language spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, but also understood and spoke English.
…
A field sobriety test showed he could not keep his balance or focus on instructions, and that he was swaying from side to side and front to back. Officers also noticed eyelid tremors and determined based on the test results that, due to a drug or controlled substance, he did not have the normal use of his mental and physical faculties to safely operate a motor vehicle.
Foreign truck drivers are pushing up the highway accident rate and pushing Americans out of jobs and well-paying truck routes, Everett said. The sector is always eager for more new drivers because it loses so many overworked and underpaid Americans each year, he said.
Many cargo brokers hire illegal aliens to deliver goods to and from U.S. sites. The migrants often work in groups of two or more, allowing them to deliver goods faster — and at less cost than charged by American drivers — on the best-paid routes, said Everett. The “labor dumping,” he said, ensures that brokers can cut Americans out of good wages and jobs, and are pushing multiple American trucking companies out of business.
The rising number of foreign drivers is enabled by the federal government’s decision to roll back border rules and driver safety requirements, including a rule that drivers were expected to understand English.
Many migrants took trucking jobs after being welcomed through President Joe Biden’s loose borders, either at the southern border or at international airports.
“For us, the biggest problem is …. illegal immigrants coming in and getting the license without anything,” said Rhaman Dhillon, the founder of the California-based North American Punjabi Truckers Association. “No training, no language [test], no nothing. They still get it,” he told Breitbart News.
Federal and state rules make it easy for migrants to get commercial driver’s licenses, he said:
You can go ahead and get your written test passed in California, your physical [test] done in California, your drug test done in California, and then you go to Utah for your skill test. In [10 states], the drive test is given by a private third-party company, so those people, they will pass you in the drive test by accepting money.
…
There’s a proposed rulemaking in [the federal agencies] right now, it is working its way through that where they want more states to do this same thing because they think there is a driver shortage. We always say there’s no driver shortage, it’s a driver retention crisis because companies are not taking care of the drivers the way they should be. So that’s why people are coming in and they’re leaving the industry very quickly.
“There are 12 states, including Washington, D.C., that have state-only testing, while there are 29 states that have a combination of third-party and state testing, leaving 10 states with third-party testing only,” according to OverDriveOnline.
The migrant influx into trucking is extraordinarily rapid.
In 2021, for example, National Public Radio reported that “the North American Punjabi Trucking Association estimates Punjabi Sikhs make up 20 percent of the country’s truckers and control as much as 40 percent of the industry in California.” NPR did not estimate the share who are illegal migrants or who are working illegally on tourist visas.
Drivers from Eastern Europe are also getting on U.S. roads. A trucking publication, Freight Waves, described illegal driving by East Europeans, including one driver who said he was pressured to drive for 50 hours straight:
“Many of us in the trucking industry know this is nothing less than human trafficking and that’s been going on since the 1990s when the Berlin Wall fell,” Joe Rajkovacz, director of governmental affairs for the Western States Trucking Association (WSTA), told FreightWaves. “Men from Eastern Europe and India were brought over by some companies with false promises of a better life and were enslaved to drive a truck.”
Everett has been pushing federal agencies to deal with the problems caused by migrant truckers since 2019 after he had to lay off 450 U.S. drivers at his Arkansas trucking firm. However, he made no progress under President Joe Biden’s pro-migration administration. “No, none at all,” he said.
Dhillon also pushed Biden’s federal officials to address the problems. “I raised this point in front of FMCSA [Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration], in front of DoT [Department of Transportation],” Dhillon said, adding:
I was on the Biden-Harris Trucking Action Plan Committee. I met Mr. Biden. I went to White House. We did everything we could to raise this point in front of OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration], in front of the Labor Department, that, “Hey, this is the biggest loophole right now that this industry has.”
Now Everett is lobbying the Arkansas legislature to help prod the federal government to close the loopholes and to help U.S. truckers regain work from the migrants.
In the state House, he’s pushing a bill that would bar drivers with trucking licenses granted by distant countries from Arkansas roads.
He’s facing a rival bill sponsored by the state’s powerful Arkansas Trucking Association of trucking companies. That bill passed a committee vote on Wednesday — despite testimony showing the danger of migrant drivers — and may be approved by the state assembly on Thursday, March 20.
The association’s bill provides two useful features, including the ability for state troopers to arrest foreign drivers who present fake credentials, such as faked Commercial Drivers Licenses from Mexico, said Everett. But those two elements are a smoke screen for the bill’s failure to deal with the core problem caused by the rising number of foreign truckers, he added.
Worse, the bill would change state law to echo business-backed federal regulations that favor migrant drivers and their low-wage employers, he said:
They are changing Arkansas State law, which currently only allows a commercial driver’s license from the United States or Canada … to include foreign commercial driver’s licenses.
He added:
In our transportation committee hearing, safety experts testified that these foreign commercial driver’s licenses have no database or repository that we can access and that our safety professionals here in the United States can [use to] see … these people’s driving history or their backgrounds.
So why would we extend [driving license] reciprocity to …. those foreign driver’s licenses when they’re not reciprocating with all the background information and driver history of all these drivers? So we just believe that’s egregious. We cannot believe that our own American Trucking Association would have a different standard for foreign drivers than they have for our American drivers.
…
However, the main problem lies in Washington, where lobbyists for trucking companies and retailers have helped produce rules and regulations that enable migrant drivers, minimize safety testing, and throttle enforcement of U.S. standards on foreign drivers, he said.
For example, trucking companies can hire foreigners who fly into the United States with B-1 visas that are supposedly reserved for foreign employees attending training sessions or conference events. This loophole means companies can hire truckers from many countries — including India — to replace Americans who would otherwise deliver loads on routes into and out of Canada and Mexico.
His perspective is now likely to get a friendly hearing in the federal government because President Donald Trump has promised to deport millions of illegal aliens.
Trump worked hard to get the endorsement of the Teamsters Union in 2024. The union did not endorse him but also chose to not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris amid pro-Trump grassroots pressure from truck drivers.
Trump’s new Secretary of Transportation is Sean Duffy, a former congressman from Wisconsin.
The trucking industry is huge. It employs roughly 100,000 people in Arkansas, and 8.5 million people nationwide, according to the American Trucking Association. The association’s membership includes Amazon and many other companies.
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that, in 2023, there were 2.2 million trucking jobs in America.
More at:
There’s A Trucking Industry Crisis The U.S. Isn’t Doing Anything To Address
The load-hauling truck driver used to be a respectable and near-romanticized job with reliable upper-middle class wages, flexible on-the-road time, and the beauty of the American open road. As demand for truck drivers on U.S. roads continues to increase, you would imagine that companies would be paying more and offering more benefits, but the reality is exactly the opposite. The promise of high wages and “being your own boss” remain, drawing in a larger supply of drivers looking for one of the last middle-class blue collar jobs that doesn’t require a college education, and instead are finding their take-home-pay cut by delays, traffic, and deleterious working conditions. The promises of big wages are basically lies to trick America’s working poor into a cycle of near-indentured servitude labor.
According to Time, enough truckers have been burned out or washed through the cycle of getting their CDL and suffering with low wages that the real issue isn’t a shortage of truckers, but a retention crisis. This is corroborated by Vision Magazine’s piece, essentially saying that these drivers are vital parts of the economic puzzle, and aren’t compensated well enough for the hassle.
While the trucking industry once relied on owner/operators to get the work done, many drivers now contract with a major retailer like Amazon or Walmart to find some semblance of decent pay and work/life balance in exchange for being micro-managed by a faceless corporation. While this kind of trucking was once the norm, it is now reserved for the best of the best, drivers with several years of experience, spotless records, and demanding physical fitness. For most drivers on the road the reality is bleak, with some sectors delivering wages well below federal minimum thanks to hours and even days of waiting around for a load unpaid.
You don’t have to take my word for it, check out this recent video from Wendover Productions for more details and an explanation of how it got this bad.
Read More: https://www.jalopnik.com/1841921/trucking-industry-crisis-us/
As with basically every job, conditions have gotten worse and pay has decreased as laborers are further removed from the value that they create for the company. With a greater supply of increasingly poorly trained and deceived drivers, corporations and logistics facilitators can continue to squeeze their truckers because they are increasingly replaceable with another cog in the machine if they get fed up. With companies investing heavily in automating trucks, an attempt to push the worker out of the process altogether, the industry is even more aggressive with its drivers lately. The feeling is that workers have to accept lower wages because otherwise they’ll just be replaced by a machine.
Slower retail sales, lower factory demand, supply chain disruptions, and economic instability are all threats to the once-thriving American trucking industry. If the supply chain fails, everything gets significantly worse, and the entire economy could be on the precipice of a crisis if this individual problem doesn’t get solved soon. As with many other industries bent on providing slavish wages and worse working conditions, the trucking industry has increasingly relied on importing drivers from the global south, says LA Times, who are easier to control and threaten, and more likely to work for lower pay without complaint. Unfortunately there seems to be no rush to fix anything from any lawmakers or trucking companies, more interest seems instead to be placed in squeezing further blood from the stone.
More at:
More Stories
Ilhan Omar’s hubby’s $30M firm quietly scrubs names from website – as ‘Squad’ member faces mounting questions on sudden wealth amid Minnesota welfare fraud
How Christmas Eve 1776 changed the world forever
Amfest 2025 – Dr. Ben Carson on What Makes America Truly Great (VIDEO)