Mass Influx of Foreign-Born Truckers Cause Carnage on American Roads

The American trucking industry today is in trouble. Wages have flatlined for decades, while deadly accidents have steadily increased. Both of these trends share the same root cause: the massive influx of cheap, poorly trained, foreign-born drivers.

It didn’t have to be this way.

When the COVID lockdowns hit in 2020, the industry went through a very brief demand collapse as businesses closed and people lost their jobs. At the same time, people with “email jobs” began working from home, and the government started handing out “free” money to those out of work.

This is when online shopping exploded; all at once, truckers were more in demand than ever.

{snip}

Late in 2021, the White House — then occupied by the cognitively declining and dubiously elected Joseph R. Biden — put out a document called “The Biden Harris Administration Trucking Action Plan to Strengthen America’s Trucking Workforce.”

In this plan, the White House let slip what was really going on:

“At the same time, the industry reports historic demand for its services. Reflecting that demand, wages for employed drivers in all trucking segments have increased 7-12% in the last year alone, but employment in some segments is still below pre-pandemic levels.”

It is hard to ignore the implication here: The Biden administration (no doubt encouraged by American Trucking Association lobbyists), was not happy that truck driver pay had increased. Nor did they seem to believe that the market was moving fast enough to correct this bidding up of wages.

The White House’s proposed solution? Pay for people to get CDLs.

{snip}

And so the government moved to lower the requirements for a CDL — or as the White House phrased it, to expand “more seamless paths for veterans and underrepresented communities, such as women, to access good driving jobs.”

{snip}

Why then did the Biden administration claim to deliver more than 10 times the number of the supposed “shortage” that the ATA repeats ad nauseam?

Moreover, where did they find all of these extra drivers, who were clearly not drawn from the existing pool of CDL holders?

Another group asking these questions is trucker advocacy organization American Truckers United, which has been digging into the data on all of the excess CDLs produced over the past five years, some possibly due to the COVID demand increase, some through the legitimate parts of Biden’s plan, but most not.

Co-founder Shannon Everett and his team have been combing through state DMV records. Their number-crunching revealed that 10 states and Puerto Rico had somehow managed to issue over three and a half times the number of CDLs as all of the other 40 states combined.

{snip}

These increases in CDL numbers are simply too high for existing truck-driving schools and technical or community colleges to have accommodated.

Everett and his team have a different explanation: Most of these drivers have been insourced from other countries, with very little in the way of vetting.

{snip}

These hires also took advantage of a change quietly made in the waning days of the Obama administration in 2016, when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued a very curious memorandum ordering the DOT and police to stop enforcing the federal regulation requiring CDL drivers to be proficient in English.

Why drop the perfectly sensible English requirement? One clue may be found in the 2023 Biden administration update on the Trucking Action Plan, which announced that resources would be directed to “increase [the] capacity to train veterans and their family members [and] individuals from underserved and refugee communities.”

Similar language appears in the following year’s update, which includes a pledge to “increase the training opportunities for candidates from rural, refugee, and underserved communities.”

{snip}

Below is a partial listing of fatal road accidents involving foreign-born truck drivers during the last 12 months.

• An illegal alien from Mexico crashed and killed another trucker on his way home from work; he had been deported 16 times already.
• A man from Uzbekistan, who has since disappeared and is presumed to have fled the country, killed a tow-truck driver in Kentucky while he was watching YouTube and driving.
• A man from Central Africa, who doesn’t speak English and required a translator for his court proceedings, drove the wrong way on a Nevada highway, plowing his semi into three motorcyclists, who were killed instantly.
• An apparent asylum-seeker rear-ended a vehicle near Detroit and killed two women. He had no commercial driver’s license.

An Indian man driving a truck in West Virginia is accused of smashing into and pushing a car off a bridge, killing the man driving the car. The driver of the truck required a translator to communicate with police and investigators.