U.S. trucking companies are undermined by lower-wage Mexican truckers who use B-1 visitor visas to snatch delivery contracts from American truckers after they deliver a load from Mexico, says a May 8 article on the FreightWaves.com website.
“I closed in December because I saw what was going to happen,” one former owner of a trucking company told Freightwave.com. “There was no reason to try and keep up with the B-1 drivers nonsense — no one really understands what’s happened, and there’s too many [business] interests in between,” the owner said.
“Look at I-35 coming out of Laredo: All you see is the Mexican trucks coming across going north, and nine out of 10 trucks are B-1 drivers; it’s just getting out of hand,” another owner told the site. He added:
I’m an owner-operator. I have a few trucks that I operate as a regional hauling business, but I can’t compete with the B-1s … You have a lot of B-1 drivers, they take less pay, and you lose work because they can get the work. I can’t afford to drop down on my rates. Nobody will be making money, right?
NAFTA made it legal for Mexican drivers to deliver Mexican cargo to U.S. destinations and then go home. But many Mexican drivers use their B-1 visitor visas to stay on in the United States for some time — while illegally delivering U.S. cargo from sellers to buyers.
“A vast majority of people have jumped into this in the last few years, and they’re cheating the system and nobody’s doing anything about it,” said the owner of a trucking company.
The Mexican drivers can get the cargo contracts directly from brokers or directly from U.S. companies that illegally hire the lower-wage Mexican drivers. Some Mexican companies are setting up subsidiaries in the United States to help win orders for the illegal migrant drivers, the site reported.
In Canada, drivers use the H-2A agricultural worker visa to take truckers’ jobs in Maine.
On April 10, the American Trucking Association asked Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for help in getting the B-1 visa rules enforced by the Department of Homeland Security:
This is an ongoing issue that we have raised with various law enforcement organizations over the last several years. While ATA fully supports the legal use of B-1 drivers to transport international freight from Canada and Mexico into and out of the United States as part of an international trip, we believe that some U.S. trucking companies unlawfully employ these drivers to perform cabotage, i.e., to move domestic freight within the borders of the United States.
Not only is cabotage illegal, but it can also have significant economic and labor impacts on law-abiding motor carriers operating in the United States. We believe that [the DoT] can work with the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. law enforcement agencies to better patrol and enforce cabotage prohibitions against B-1 drivers and trucking companies.
FreightWaves added that the government could check drivers’ work authorization at weigh stations along the cabotage routes:
“They could check them at the scale houses along I-35,” the South Texas fuel hauler said. “They definitely have enough manpower. They could check them if they wanted to. Sometimes I’m driving through Eagle Pass, Texas. Any given time, you have 1,000 state troopers securing the border, quote unquote, instead of actually doing work. They’re out here chasing illegals. Let the Border Patrol deal with it, and the National Guard, but instead they are here doing that instead of actually cracking down on things that really matter. As far as trucking matters.”
The huge inflow of migrant drivers was encouraged by President Joe Biden’s Cuban-born, pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas. His anti-border policy has forced down wages and has reduced companies’ incentives to invest in wage-boosting productivity.
Trucking companies, retailers, and producers quietly welcomed the inflow of illegal aliens, while excusing the problem with claims that they cannot hire Americans for trucking jobs.
But the shortage of American drivers is caused by Mayorkas’s surplus of foreign drivers. The massive use of foreign drivers cuts wages and worsens working conditions, ensuring that young Americans quickly leave trucking jobs.
The lack of experienced American drivers is spiking deadly accidents. WKYT.com reported on May 9:
Kentucky State Police say 54-year-old Troy Caldwell of Morehead was loading a vehicle onto his tow truck when he was hit by a westbound commercial truck.
The driver, 29-year-old Shodmon Yuldashev of Brooklyn, New York, was initially charged with tampering with physical evidence. Troopers say he was watching YouTube on a tablet at the time of the crash and tried to power it off and hide it during the investigation.
Court records say Yuldashov was released … but he didn’t show up to his court date last October. A Bath County grand jury has now indicted Yuldashev on a murder charge, alleging he acted with extreme indifference to human life by watching videos while driving.
ABC6OnYourSide.com reported from Columbus, Ohio:
Court documents filed by Delaware County prosecutors say Gurpreet Dhaliwal of New York was arrested at the Northstar Golf Club after deputies responded to a report of a semi-truck being driven on the golf course.
The man reportedly told deputies he was lost and could not “provide a coherent reason why he would be driving a semi-truck through a golf course.”
…
Dhaliwal allegedly entered the golf course at the clubhouse and drove through the course up to the 12th hole. The semi destroyed the 16-hole bridge, which the club superintendent estimated to be $10,000 in damage. According to the complaint, the club said it would have to close the back nine.
Trump and Duffy have begun to tighten standards and enforcement. For example, Trump directed Duffy to take drivers off the road if they cannot speak and write in English.
Read the full article here