Truckers are celebrating President Donald Trump’s decision to restore enforcement of a rule that excludes foreign truckers from the roads if they cannot read English-language signs and instructions.
“They’re celebrating … Everybody’s excited, they’re happy,” said Shannon Everett, a cofounder of American Truckers United. who explained the truckers’ problems to Breitbart News in March.
The change is set by an executive order to be signed by Trump on Monday. The order tells Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy “to ensure drivers violating English proficiency rules are placed out-of-service, enhancing roadway safety,” and directs him to revamp other aspects of the trucking industry.
In 2016, President Barack Obama’s deputies told highway inspectors to stop pulling licenses from drivers who cannot speak English. That issue ballooned under President Joe Biden when many thousands of illegal migrants, legalized migrants, and B-1 visa visitors got commercial driver’s licenses via lax rules in California and other states.
“A prominent trucking insurance executive told me that he estimates more than 40% of the truck drivers in the US are first-generation immigrants,” said a tweet from industry executive Craig Fuller. “10% of the total truck driver population does not speak English proficiently.
The result is that American drivers and their trucking companies are losing revenue to huge numbers of foreign drivers, many who work in crews to run trucks without sleep through the most lucrative long-distance routes. American truckers cannot compete because such tactics would force them to violate safety regulations and split their low wages — but the migrants profit because they send their small gains back to India, Eritrea, and Guatemala, where families can live very well on a few dollars per day.
However, foreign truckers are often inexperienced and illiterate, so pushing up the death rate on American roads while raising profits for some delivery companies and retailers such as Amazon. Industry publication Freight Waves described a March 13 Texas disaster when a migrant trucker 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.
The issue has been ignored by establishment journalists, such as the staff at the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The surplus of drivers also deflates pressure for high-tech innovation and productivity gains throughout the U.S. supply chain. For example, warehouse companies face little pressure to speed up the loading and unloading of trucks, which forces drivers to waste time in parking lots.
Business groups, however, want more and cheaper drivers to shuttle goods from ports to warehouses, from factories to consumers, and from credit-card swipe to eventual bank transfer. David Bier, at the Cato Institute, for example, complained April 28 in a deleted tweet that Trump is “planning to order the firing of thousands of immigrant truck drivers …. as he is driving up the cost of deliveries …..Obviously nuts and undoubtedly illegal.”
But the problem of foreign drivers needs a bigger fix than enforcement of the language rule, Everett told Breitbart News. “We’re anxious to see the full Executive Order, to see where they’re going on the other issues, to see if they’re addressing the other issues,” he said, adding:
People need to be able to read road signs, and so we’re thankful that he’s done that. But there were also other factors — [for example], the lack of training, the qualification and vetting of the of these drivers that have flooded our industry over the past couple of years … We believe that none of these drivers have been properly vetted as they were issued these non-domiciled CDLs [commercial driver’s licenses].
In the meantime, he and his group are lobbying for new laws in Oklahoma and are using X to share information about the damage caused by drivers from India, South America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere:
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