Highway to hell: 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.

An illegal alien from Mexico crashed and killed another trucker on his way home from work; he had been deported 16 times already.

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.

By 2021, this had translated to incredible pay rates, which caused many people with a commercial driver’s license to re-enter the business.

Even while doing its usual fatuous whining about the supposed “shortage” of truck drivers, the American Trucking Associations had to admit that its own research revealed that there were 10 million people in the United States with an active CDL.

It was all a fine example of the market operating as it should. Naturally, the government had to get involved and create a problem where there wasn’t one.

Steep incline ahead

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.

“The nation’s trucking workforce also demands clear, debt-free paths into these good jobs through high-quality training, such as Registered Apprenticeships, which prepare trainees and provide employers with a steady pipeline of skilled, safe, and experienced drivers.”

Taxpayer largesse

Perhaps the Biden administration was not aware of the ATA-owned or ATA-adjacent truck-driving schools already receiving taxpayer funds for those "debt-free paths"? As I wrote in November 2023:

Scratch beneath the surface of the ad copy for any truck driver training school, or local- and state-funded retraining programs, and government grants and subsidies become immediately apparent. From funds doled out by The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) to Pell Grants to $47 million in extra funding from the Biden Administration, it is clear that the trucking industry is awash in taxpayer largesse.

In a recent study examining driver retention problems in California, it was discovered that the state spent around $20 million on driver training, but found all that was being financed was a revolving door, as those drivers did not stick with the industry.

Lowering standards

If using millions in taxpayer funds to pay for training couldn’t get those pesky wage numbers to go down, maybe it wasn’t the cost of the training that was the problem.

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.”

An April 2022 Fact Sheet update that has since been scrubbed from the White House website included a stunning figure that ought to have raised some eyebrows. Thanks to “cutting red tape,” the DOT helped states “more than double new commercial driver’s license issuances in January and February 2022 compared to January and February 2021. States have issued more than 876,000 CDLs since January 2021."

Those numbers do not sit well with anyone who knows and understands the industry.

A sudden influx

Suppose we accept for a moment the ATA’s unlikely claim that there’s a shortage of 80,000 drivers and that that shortage could grow as high as 160,000 by 2030.

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.

To take just two examples, Oregon dumped 98,872 truck drivers into the system in 2022, a staggering 77 times the normal yearly number. South Carolina counted 77,580 new truckers in 2021.

“Is it even possible to test, train, and qualify 43 times your normal throughput?” asked the ATU on X. “Did FedEx and UPS move all of their operations to South Carolina?”

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

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

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.

No English necessary

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.

U.S. Department of Transportation

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.”

Much was made this week about President Trump pausing components of Biden's refugee program, which will affect hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. In an X post Thursday, industry insider Craig Fuller cited confidential sources claiming that immigrant truckers make up 52% of premiums at one of the country's largest insurers; 14% of them are Ukrainian.

Ukranians seem to be specifically recruited by CDL mills like this one in Pennsylvania.

Arkansas fights back

According to Everett, waiving the language requirement is just one tactic to boost immigrant driver numbers. In his home state of Arkansas, legislators have rewritten regulations governing who may qualify for a CDL, removing domicile requirements and even allowing learner’s permits from other countries to be proof enough to get a CDL. This alarmed Everett enough to lobby for a bill to prevent Arkansas from allowing unvetted and non-domiciled foreign drivers to operate in the state.

The ATU has also found a disturbing correlation between the massive spike in CDLs issued and the steady increase in truck-involved collisions and fatalities. This time period has also seen a massive rise in freight fraud, where trailers are stolen, dodgy load brokers fail to pay the truckers who moved freight, or shady trucking companies hold loads for ransom.

Tellingly, the original "Trucking Action Plan" from 2021 failed to mention refugees or migrants at all. Nonetheless, the increased presence of foreign drivers — either “refugees” or simply in the country illegally — on American roads is clear evidence that the Biden administration made good on its promise.

So is the steady increase of deadly carnage on the nation’s highways and byways, witnessed in person or in a steady stream of online videos, as well as the steady depression of American trucker wages.

The road ahead

Will anyone in the new administration do anything to protect the American trucker and the motoring public?

The first step would be for the Trump administration to appoint a leader to the FMCSA who will investigate the anomalies in these CDL spikes and find out why so many foreign truckers are still operating on American highways — especially given recent trucking company closures that have put thousands of American truckers out of work.

New Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy should work with state DOTs to find out why they have diluted standards for the privilege of driving trucks in America, putting the American public at risk and allowing unscrupulous operators to employ cheap labor and force the market rate for trucker pay down.

President Trump has a clear mandate to Make America Great Again, but he can’t do it without the help of America’s truckers.

Carnage on America’s roads

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.