The United States has moved to immediately suspend the issuance of visas for foreign commercial truck drivers, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Thursday, a decision that followed a fatal crash, which ignited outrage among President Donald Trump’s supporters.
“Effective immediately, we are halting all worker visas for commercial truck drivers,” Rubio wrote in a post on X. He argued that the rising presence of foreign drivers behind the wheels of heavy tractor-trailers was both putting American lives at risk and undermining the livelihoods of U.S. truckers.
Fatal Florida Crash
The announcement came in the wake of a deadly incident in Florida, where Harjinder Singh, an Indian national, allegedly caused a crash that killed three people while attempting an illegal U-turn on Florida’s Turnpike.
Federal officials said Singh had entered the United States unlawfully via Mexico in 2018 and later failed an English proficiency test after the crash. He has since been charged with three counts of vehicular homicide.
The case has received widespread media coverage and quickly took on political overtones. Florida officials, aligned with Trump’s Republican Party, spotlighted the crash, with the state’s lieutenant governor personally accompanying immigration officers to California to oversee Singh’s extradition on Thursday.
The controversy has drawn attention to Singh’s time in California, a state led by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, which issued him a commercial license despite its opposition to Trump’s hardline immigration policies.
Trump, Newsom Trade Blame
The Trump administration accused Newsom of enabling the tragedy, pointing to the license issuance, while Newsom’s office countered that it was the federal government under Trump that had approved Singh’s work permit, adding that California fully cooperated in returning him to Florida authorities.
Republican lawmakers had already been criticising foreign-born truck drivers before the crash, citing an uptick in highway accidents, though no direct evidence has been presented to link immigrant drivers to rising crash rates.
In June, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy mandated that commercial truck drivers must demonstrate English proficiency, reversing Obama-era 2016 guidance that advised against removing drivers solely on language grounds.
To obtain a U.S. commercial license, drivers have long been required to show basic English skills, including the ability to read road signs.
Immigrant Drivers Fill Shortages
Nonetheless, the trucking industry has increasingly relied on foreign-born workers to fill shortages. Federal statistics show that the number of immigrant truck drivers more than doubled from 2000 to 2021, reaching approximately 720,000.
Presently, immigrants account for 18% of the U.S. trucking workforce—matching the broader labour market but marking a notable shift for an occupation historically associated with the white working class.
Industry data indicates that over half of these foreign-born drivers are from Latin America, with a growing number in recent years arriving from India and Eastern European countries, particularly Ukraine.
(With inputs from IBNS)
