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.
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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,” 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.
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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 illegals.
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 Harri 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.
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