President Biden may be on his way out of office, but his administration has used his final weeks in office to give one last kick in the pants to working-class Americans. As LandLine Magazine revealed last week, the Department of Homeland Security has made an additional 70,000 H-2B visas available for next year, doubling the number of the previous year, when 1,500 were given to transportation occupations like trucking. 130,000 visas might not sound like a lot in a country as populous as the United States, and 1,500 given to truckers even less so, but when you consider market conditions and just how bad the trucking industry has gotten, you start to see how much of a middle finger to truck drivers this really is.
How bad have things gotten for trucking? The online trucking industry magazine FreightWaves has an entire section of their website dedicated to nothing but trucking company bankruptcies and truck driver layoffs. A quick scan through the most recent dozen of 82 articles for 2024 alone show that over 4,000 truckers in the United States were laid off in October and November, and thousands more are at risk of being laid off as the companies they work for seek bankruptcy protection. This number doesn't include many self employed truckers whose business closures are much more difficult to track.
Given this fact, what on earth would cause DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to push for more visas for foreign truckers? He gave us a window into his thinking recently in a November press release. "There are employers across the country that would suffer greatly without H-2B workers," Mayorkas said. "Authorizing these supplemental visas helps U.S. employers fill those positions ... It helps fuel our economy and reduce irregular migration while also providing a safe and lawful pathway to the United States for noncitizens who are prepared to work."
It's always about the employers for Mayorkas.
Perhaps Mayorkas still believes in the debunked "driver shortage narrative" that corporate lobbying groups like the American Trucking Association have been pushing for decades in an effort to extract taxpayer subsidies for their in-house CDL schools. But there isn't a trucker shortage; there's a retention crisis, the result of plummeting wages that can be traced back to the deregulation of the business, brought to us by another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, and his Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Thanks to Carter, the average truck driver's salary today is half of what it was in 1980.
The Biden administration's latest slap in the face is exactly the kind of policy that has kept truckers' salaries in the toilet. Like so much else under the Democrats, when greeted with bad working conditions, their answer is, let's bring in more immigrants who won't complain. The trucking industry in America has come to rely on migrant labor instead of improving pay and conditions for American workers.
That's the context in which to understand Mayorkas' visa gambit: It's designed to make it easier for American companies to bypass their fellow citizens for jobs, following a pattern that sees exploiting migrants as a more profitable alternative to offering jobs with decent pay and conditions.
It should come as no surprise that drivers from other countries are often poorly trained, and many do not communicate in English, which you would think to be a requirement for a safety sensitive job like trucking, and it is. Meanwhile, corrupt DMVs have been found to be giving out CDLs without even testing the drivers, with predictable negative results on highway safety.
For America's truckers, the end of the Biden administration can't come soon enough.
A piece of legislation has been languishing in committee since it was introduced in 2022 by former Democratic Congressman Andy Levin that would have massively helped America's truckers—the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act. Though Democrats lost control of Congress in midterms later in 2022, President Biden could have demanded that this piece of legislation be prioritized. What truckers got instead was nothing but the government throwing yet more money at the retention problem, which helps to keep truckers wages frozen.
The re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency has been welcomed by many of America's truckers, and we hope that President Trump does not repeat the same policy mistakes of the Biden administration. Trump has signaled that he will prioritize American workers; a nice symbolic gesture to start out his second term would be to cancel the visas issued by Mayorkas and Biden. There are plenty of American truckers out of work who could fill those positions right now.
Gord Magill is a trucker, writer, and commentator, and can be found at www.autonomoustruckers.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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