We Have a Sikh Problem in Trucking
It’s not just a safety issue. It’s an American worker issue.
Recent deadly crashes caused by foreign truck drivers have captured the nation’s attention. But few Americans probably realize a tiny immigrant group is quietly building a cartel in the American trucking industry that threatens the livelihoods of current and future American truck drivers.
In March, a truck driver in Texas failed to brake and crashed into a line of cars, causing a 17-car pileup that killed five people.
In August, an illegal alien driver made a U-turn in the middle of an interstate freeway in Florida, killing three people.
In October, a former illegal alien driver, whom President Joe Biden paroled, caused an eight-car pileup in California, killing three people.
And right before Thanksgiving, an illegal alien truck driver caused the deaths of newlyweds 25-year-old William Carter and 24-year-old Jennifer Lower in Oregon.
In response, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has cracked down on foreign drivers.
Under federal pressure, California—which issued licenses to the Florida, California, and Oregon culprits—revoked 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses that had been wrongly issued to immigrants or allowed to remain valid after a driver’s work permit expired.
Under the new rules, only immigrants with an H-2a, H-2b, or E-2 visa will qualify to drive.
Legal foreign drivers are grandfathered in, but only five percent of them would meet the new requirements if they were not.
But even this is quite generous.
H-2b, the non-agricultural temporary visa, and the E-2 foreign investor visa are understandable since companies may need drivers on a temporary basis, and foreigners who start businesses here should be allowed to transport their own merchandise. But H-2a visa holders are supposed to be picking apples or tending livestock. Allowing them to drive trucks is a cheap labor handout to trucking companies.
A 2023 report from the Immigration Research Initiative found there are over half a million foreign-born truck drivers in the U.S.
Foreign Truck Drivers Are Not Exactly a Diverse Lot
The Florida and California crashes drew attention to Sikh drivers because both culprits were adherents of that religion.
But they aren’t killing drivers in the U.S. with semi-trucks at a higher rate than other foreign groups because they’re bad people or exceptionally bad drivers. There are simply a lot more of them in the trucking industry.
A religious minority in India, around half a million Sikhs reside in the U.S., consisting of about 0.15 percent of the population. Sikh advocacy groups claim around 150,000 of those U.S. residents are truck drivers. That means despite making up only one percent of the foreign-born population in the U.S., Sikhs make up 27 percent of the country’s foreign-born truck drivers.
The North American Punjabi Truckers Association estimates that on the West coast, 40 percent of the Sikh workforce consists of truck drivers.
This is what an immigrant cartel looks like. Sikhs don’t possess any special truck driving culture that all other religious and ethnic groups lack. But open borders and lax oversight create an environment where foreign groups accustomed to a lower standard of living than Americans can infiltrate industries, undercut wages, and through nepotism slowly take them over by crowding out other immigrants and American citizens.
On immigration, many conservatives like to virtue signal through their praise of “the good ones” who work hard and don’t commit crimes. But the U.S. should not sideline its own people to create roster slots for the world’s hardest workers.
In reality, all foreign-born Sikhs crowd out American workers, just like all immigrants crowd out American workers.
Time to Face Facts
This doesn’t mean the U.S. should not accept immigrants. But Americans need to be realistic about the labor consequences of mass immigration, including where foreign groups settle, what industries they’re working in, and how easily they can assimilate.
Immigration should be kept low, and those admitted should be peppered across the country and across industries to prevent the development of foreign communities and cartels.
Additionally, although the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion to all belief systems, it does not mean the U.S. government has to ignore the dominant religions in the countries it accepts immigrants from. In fact, before 1965, the U.S. tailored its immigration policies to admit foreign populations in proportion with the demographic makeup of native American citizens.
This policy came from the negative experience of near open borders at Ellis Island. Allowing mass immigration from populations with values at odds with most Americans led to massive political unrest, organized crime, and political terrorism.
Immigrants—even the good ones—remain loyal to their people first. In the off chance they raise their children in a predominantly American community, maybe their grandchildren will identify as monocultural Americans.
Let’s consider “conservative” Indian-born Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who happens to be Sikh—and a former ACLU member.
Few people attack the Left as viciously as she does. Few Republicans sound as right-wing as she sounds. Few people in President Donald Trump’s administration have more effectively waged lawfare against Democrats and cracked down on illegal immigration like she has.
Yet when push comes to shove, in knee-jerk fashion, she sides with her fellow Sikhs over her fellow Americans.
By her logic, Americans must have eaten grass before Sikhs first “appeared on the U.S. trucking scene in the 1980s.”
Mass Immigration Naturally Creates Foreign Cartels
Dhillon and others support replacement migration—as long as it’s their group doing the replacing—arguing their people dominate certain industries because they’re superior workers. They’re simply outcompeting Americans on the free market—winning at “meritocracy.”
But it’s hardly a free market when tens of thousands of workers accustomed to a much lower standard of living than Americans flood a single industry over a short period of time. Lower labor costs aside, they’re easier for companies to hire in bulk, and when their co-nationals, co-ethnics, or co-religionists open small businesses in that industry like trucking companies, out-group members need not apply.
Jonathan Marques, founder of the Driving Academy in Linden, New Jersey told the AP, “Removing noncitizen drivers from the industry could force trucking companies to increase wages for entry-level operators and draw more job seekers.”
Critics will argue consumers may face higher prices at the grocery store, but the effects would bring a net positive for society.
Immigrant truck drivers, who are 19 percent of the industry, earn about $44,000. This is 23 percent less than the national average of $57,400. If this underclass were replaced with Americans earning the current national average wage, it would only increase the average to $60,000. That’s a five percent raise for drivers but would hardly cause a price apocalypse for shoppers.
Unlike inflation from dollar devaluation, this adds real value to the economy through higher wages that American citizens will spend in the U.S. As a market correction, this type of inflation is not necessarily permanent as new entrepreneurs figure out how to offer products at lower prices to consumers using the American labor pool. But even if price inflation matched wage inflation perfectly, paying five percent more for lettuce is worth safer highways.
The Solutions Are Clear
Open-borders American lawmakers and bureaucrats are to blame for the horrific, fatal pileups and suppressed wages caused by foreign truck drivers. The unchecked influx of Sikh drivers is creating an immigrant cartel that undercuts wages, stifles job opportunities for Americans, and poses safety risks for everyone on America's roadways.
Policy tweaks like visa restrictions help. But true reform demands low immigration across the board, strategic dispersal of newcomers across regions and industries, and a rejection of the fallacy that America owes its prosperity to foreign labor. Prioritizing American citizens in the workforce isn't xenophobia or religious bigotry—it's essential to preserving a national free market in labor that is not undermined by replacement migration.
Jacob Grandstaff is an Investigative Researcher for Restoration News specializing in election integrity and labor policy. He graduated from the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.
Republished with permission from Restoration News.
