Trucking

Among the many things that kept J. Edgar Hoover up at night during the Cold War, one of the most distressing was the prospect of a nationwide truckers’ strike. The expansion of the federal highway system had made trucking a vital lifeblood of American domestic logistics, and thus a primary target of Soviet Communist subversion. Communist putsches had succeeded in taking over regional branches of the Teamsters Union in the 30s and 40s, and while the Teamsters had pushed back against these efforts — often with the help of the Mafia and more homegrown organized crime — Hoover and others in the federal government knew that they needed to keep close tabs on the industry. A general strike set off like a time bomb by Soviet subversives was seen as one of the likely precursors to war, as such a strike could bring the domestic supply chain to its knees. That strike never happened, but what did eventually happen to the trucking industry would have bewildered even the most fanciful Cold Warrior.

In the summer of 2025, when an Indian immigrant named Harjinder Singh performed an illegal U-turn with his semi on a Florida highway and killed a family of three, it alerted many to a rapid demographic transformation within the trucking industry. Motorists in the United States and Canada have noticed that a shocking number of commercial truck drivers are now Indian - numbers one might suspect could not have happened so quickly without concentrated action. And one would be right to suspect that. Over the past decade, the trucking industry has been the target of an aggressive plan to disenfranchise its core workforce and flood it with underpaid and under-skilled immigrants.

The American Trucking Association, or ATA, had a problem on its hands when the COVID pandemic produced a demand/labor imbalance that gave long-haul truckers leverage for higher pay. The ATA represents the trucking companies, not the truckers themselves, so they appealed to the Biden Administration in 2021 for a slate of policies that could help suppress the native truckers’ position. These included major changes to the CDL qualifications, such as making the inability to speak English — technically still a requirement to hold a CDL — merely a fine instead of grounds for disqualification, and even that level of enforcement was discouraged via federal memoranda. It also lowered training and testing standards, and drastically increased the number of new CDL certifications the trucking companies could offer - nearly a million new openings were created in just a few years. All this laid the ground to bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants to take the new CDLs, mostly from India through a series of shady Indian connecting firms and pliant American politicians. These immigrants brought over more of their friends and family illegally, some of whom also consumed the CDLs that were being given out like candy thanks to the purposefully lax watch of then Labor Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

After the deadly wreck in Florida — for which the Indian driver was charged with vehicular homicide - the Prime Minister of India appealed on video to Florida authorities for leniency. As if it were obvious that a foreign head of state should intervene on behalf of one of her citizens that was illegally in the United States running freight through the American highway system. Trucks stops in Florida and other states have been turned into defacto ICE checkpoints due to the preponderance of illegal immigrants driving commercial freight. And the ATA has geared up for a new set of policy attacks on its domestic workforce.

Policy changes have diluted the value of a skilled trucker in both the U.S. and Canada, and weaponized immigration and the resultant decline in workforce performance has made his job more miserable. He’s forced to compete with low wage immigrants who no longer have to get past stringent qualification hurdles. Thanks to ever-more common language barriers, they routinely struggle to communicate with others truckers on the highways, driving down safety and efficiency. They now have to put up with cabin cameras and other means of tehcno-micromanagement thanks to the increase in accidents caused by those low-skilled immigrants, which of course doesn’t solve the problems at root — it just documents them. A notable recent disaster in Canada saw an Indian trucker with less than two weeks’ experience somehow behind the wheel of a rig twice the size he was qualified for - with which he drove past a sign he didn’t understand, struck a bus, and killed an entire youth hockey team.

In a strange turn of fortune that would shock J. Edgar Hoover, American trucking has become a political threat to the Left rather than the Right. A survey of party affiliation among truckers would surely bear this out. And the liberal establishment and its globalized corporate partners do not want a repeat of the trucker protests in Canada that threatened that country’s leadership a few years ago, a threat Trudeau also sought to destroy by importing a replacement workforce.

Immigration is an old weapon of union busting — not just labor unions, but unions between people and communities. Truckers have comprised a small but logistically important segment of the American white middle class for decades. And that segment has been targeted for disenfranchisement and eventual destruction. It’s been a steady industry where a man can make a good living without a college degree, wherein he often has the autonomy and respect of a small business owner. The ruling regime and organizations like the ATA consider these men a temporary nuisance as they race toward automation, but they figure diluting them with Indians will crack their leverage in the meantime. They’re probably right.

Hoover might even be impressed.