Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

With all the propaganda about the Mexican truck issue, it’s hard to distinguish between fact and fear mongering, I’ve grown more apathetic neutral about the whole thing.

Teamsters and OOIDA say that the Mexican truck issue is about American jobs. If they were worried about jobs someone should have said something about the in-sourcing of truck driving jobs that has been going on for years. As far back as 2000 there has been an influx of Eastern European drivers. Canada has been in-sourcing to fix their driver shortage for years with drivers from all over the world for years.

The Teamsters are only against Mexican trucks because they can’t organize them. A few Mexican trucks driven by middle class Mexican drivers are the least of our worries. What we should be worried about is the new immigration bill that will make every illegal alien in this country legal. They may not be citizens right away, but they will be legal to work in the US.

Imagine this – If I was an illegal doing the back breaking work picking crops or construction and I saw a sign that read – Drive a truck, we train, hablamos espanol. Let’s see, stand for hours in the sun, or sit in an air conditioned cab? Now that I’m legal, in three weeks I’m a truck driver. I work hard, I drive for days and days, because if I’m driving local, there are no log books. If I drive interstate, I have a logbook, but don’t care because if I don’t deliver I get fired because my boss tells me there are five more newly legalized workers waiting to take my job. The odds of getting caught are slim and worth the chance.

I speak Spanish, so I’m able to drive and work in Mexifornia, Mexizona and Mexas with no problems. Once Amerimexico trucks start driving to Mexico, I’ll have a driving job because of all the gringos drivers that don’t speak Spanish. Plus, I’ll be able to bring more family back with me so they’ll be ready for the next amnesty.

My boss loves to hire new legal workers, because we have clean driving records since we’ve never had a license before. And besides that immigration violation, identity theft, fraud, buying those forged documents and tax evasion that no one cares about, we don’t have any kind of criminal records either, we work much harder than those lazy American drivers and we do it for a lot less. If we get caught speeding or log book violations or even in an accident, my boss blames the driver, gets rid of them, then hires someone else.

What a great country, those American drivers didn’t know how good they had it.

The “driver shortage” is now fixed with a pool of twelve to twenty million newly legal workers to choose from because American trucking companies can’t find enough Americans to drive to keep the economy moving smoothly. A few Mexican trucks going back and forth, not real high on my list right now. Maybe it’s time to change our priorities and start calling our Congress people about the real clear and present danger to American jobs.