Then They Came for the Immigrant Truckers
Like working on a farm, driving a truck is far from the most rewarding occupation, which is why both industries are chronically understaffed and need immigrants to fill their ranks.
Last week, in the umpteenth instance of its privileging the xenophobic rage of Trump and consigliere Stephen Miller over the needs of the American people, the Trump administration banned roughly 200,000 truck-driving-certified immigrants from any further truck driving. The new rule from the Department of Transportation forbids refugees, asylum seekers, or recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) from obtaining commercial driver’s licenses, and forbids those who currently hold such licenses from renewing them.
Some of the affected drivers have gone to court to see if they can get that rule overturned. In California, a suit filed by the Asian Law Caucus and the Sikh Coalition sought to circumvent that rule, but they won only a brief stay that has already expired. The state itself had contested the ruling while it was still pending—as had New York, Pennsylvania, and other blue states—arguing that the federal government had issued work permits to all those affected by its ban, but it has found it has no recourse to implementing the rule.
California had been singled out by Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, as the foremost miscreant state for having the most immigrant (albeit certified) truck drivers on the road, vowing to withhold $160 million in appropriated transportation funding if it failed to comply with the ban. The state’s reluctant compliance came complete with a protest from its Department of Motor Vehicles:
All the individuals issued non-domiciled CDLs by the DMV had been granted work authorization by the federal government and were legally present in the United States at the time their license was issued. While a recent court ruling now allows affected individuals to submit a new CDL application, the federal government is barring the DMV from processing these applications currently. Given that the DMV is compliant with state and federal law, it is incumbent upon the federal government to allow the DMV to process those applications and issue licenses to eligible drivers.
The number of California truckers estimated to be deprived of their licenses by the new rule is 20,000; 13,000 have already received notices from the DMV stating their licenses will be canceled. Nationally, according to a 2023 study by the Department of Transportation, 15.7 percent of licensed commercial truckers were immigrants. In some critical niches of the nation’s supply chain, however, that percentage is much higher. A 2021 survey of the drivers who pick up the imported goods at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which receive roughly 42 percent of all the goods coming into the United States, and transport them to the huge distribution warehouses in the Inland Empire, showed that 67 percent of the drivers were immigrants.
There’s a clear reason why the trucking workforce relies on immigrants: The jobs are arduous and low-paying. The average yearly take-home pay of those L.A. port truckers, according to a survey by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, is a munificent $28,000, which comes complete with no benefits whatever. In 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) put the median income of all long-haul truckers at $53,000 for those who were employees and $45,000 for those who were independent contractors (often mislabeled as such by their employers—Amazon and FedEx most particularly—as a means to save those employers money), but both groups had to work well more than 40 hours a week to make that much.
As I noted in an article on the trucking industry that ran in the Prospect’s 2022 special issue on supply chains:
Confronted with jobs that take them away from their families and require long hours for low pay and scant if any benefits, America’s truck drivers don’t stay truck drivers for very long. A 2019 study by University of Minnesota economist Stephen Burks and Kristen Monaco of the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the annual turnover rate of long-haul truckers is a breathtaking 94 percent.
It wasn’t ever thus. From the late 1930s through 1980, while New Deal legislation that established industry standards was in effect and while the Teamsters had been able to unionize more than half of the nation’s long-haul drivers, truck driving was among the nation’s higher-paying blue-collar jobs. Following the 1980 deregulation of the industry, however, union membership, wages, and benefits all crumbled. According to the BLS, by 1998, drivers were making between 30 percent and 40 percent less than their pre-1980 predecessors had made, and the share of unionized drivers had dropped from a pre-1980 high of 57 percent to the roughly 10 percent it was at the start of this decade.
You may think that taking certified truck drivers, who’ve all been granted federal work permits, off the roads—in an industry that has 94 percent yearly turnover—may not serve the common good particularly well. You may also think that it is a gratuitous crime to harm the fortunes of those drivers and their families, not to mention an act of malignant folly to jack up the prices of the goods that will come late or go undelivered without immigrant drivers to take them to their destinations. If so, you’d be right.
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