Americans have become more reliant than ever on freight deliveries, with trucking volumes expected to increase significantly. Nearly three-quarters of the nation’s goods are moved by trucks, yet the industry is facing a dire shortage of truck drivers. Estimates peg that shortfall up to 80,000 drivers — yet the Trump administration is removing thousands of qualified drivers from the roads.
It’s part of the Republican effort to crack down on immigration and immigrant labor. In the West, more than a third of drivers are immigrants — mostly Sikhs from India — and immigrants make up about 20% of the national trucking workforce.
Now, the administration is forcing the California Department of Motor Vehicles to cancel the licenses of 13,000 immigrant drivers. DMV noted that, “All the individuals … had been granted work authorization by the federal government and were legally present in the United States at the time their license was issued.” But that’s not enough to appease this administration.
The administration won’t let the agency process these drivers’ updated applications — and has threatened the state’s transportation funds over the matter.
“These workers did everything the law required of them, yet they’re the ones being punished for a bureaucratic failure they didn’t create,” attorney Katherine Zhao from the San Francisco’s Asian Law Caucus told the San Francisco Chronicle. “The state cannot rip away people’s licenses first and figure out a fix later.”
This unnecessary crackdown is not only disrupting people’s livelihoods, but could further slow deliveries and drive up the cost of products that are delivered by tractor trailer. It’s not just California, either. Per The Guardian, ICE is “targeting truck stops, weigh stations and immigrant truckers as they drive behind the wheel” throughout the Midwest.
Federal officials cite road safety as their key concern after two tragic truck-related accidents involving immigrant drivers, but those concerns are based on anecdotes rather than evidence. Taking qualified drivers off the road — and forcing a smaller pool of drivers to meet rising demand — strikes us as a more dangerous situation.
As the great economist Thomas Sowell said, there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs. The tradeoffs here do not justify the overzealous crackdown on immigrant truckers, but that’s what we’re seeing.
Such efforts also are backed by some established trucking interests, which argue that the immigrant drivers are driving down profits and wages. Making matters worse, some state legislatures are passing laws that would make it more difficult for automated trucks to operate without a human driver, which is one way to pick up the slack.
As a result, prices surely will rise for products delivered by truck, which is precisely the opposite of what Americans want after years of persistently high inflation have made life increasingly unaffordable.
Once again, we see there’s a price to pay for the administration’s misguided fixation on immigration. And once again, we’re seeing immigrants scapegoated for political point scoring.