‘Cause we had a mighty convoy
Rockin’ through the night
Yeah, we had a mighty convoy
Now immigration is tight
Finding new and exciting ways to drive up costs! There’s already a shortage of over-the-road drivers. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to limit CDL licenses to immigrants. I wonder if the decision was made after watching this classic -
Stephen Miller begs to differ.
Last year, Duffy revealed that California was the only state failing to enforce regulations requiring truckers to demonstrate English proficiency and comprehension of traffic signs.
DB2
For the record this is mostly a non-issue. The US and Mexico use the same signing conventions and colors (there is a UN department which attempts, usually successfully, to coordinate highway and regulatory signage around the world). So in Mexico stop signs are red, they are eight sided, but use the word “ALTO” instead of “STOP”. Anyone seeing the two understands immediately what they mean. Likewise for “YIELD” and so on.
While being able to read “names” etc is a good thing, GPS comes in all kinds of languages so even that is not really an issue. I would not say there is NO advantage in being English literate, but it is really quite small and to most drivers it is practically irrelevant.
(This is not true in aviation, where there are no “signs” and all instructions must be rendered in a common language so everyone understand them.)
But let the xenophobes rule, I guess. It’s a small price for, uh, not much anyway.
Except when it isn’t. You’ve certainly seen more complex signage than a stop sign, including those changeable LED (?) signs. Not to mention things such as hazmat placards and detour instructions.
English Language Proficiency (ELP) requirements for CDLs have existed for years under Federal law. Enforcement seems very worthwhile to me to understand traffic signage and communicate with police (not to mention record keeping).
DB2
More than 550 commercial driving schools in the U.S. that train truckers and bus drivers must close after investigators found they employed unqualified instructors, failed to adequately test students and had other safety issues, the federal Transportation Department announced Wednesday.
The move marks the Transportation Department’s latest effort to improve safety in the trucking industry. And unlike its previous actions last fall to decertify up to 7,500 schools that included many defunct operations, this latest step is focused on what it deemed were active schools with significant shortcomings that inspectors identified in 1,426 site visits.
DB2
Stephen Miller may be the worst human being currently living on the planet.
While there’s certainly overlap between immigrants who had their CDLs yoinked and those who wouldn’t be able to pass an English proficiency exam, the two groups aren’t totally congruent.
There have been a few studies regarding safety and English Language Proficiency (ELP), but nothing conclusive.
Study links ELP violations to unsafe motor carriers - FreightWaves**
Sure, there’s a lot of sketchiness in the motor carrier industry, outside of a driver’s language proficiency or immigration status. Many of the “driver safety” concerns are focused on ELP, instead of the impacts caused by negligent carriers pushing their drivers to do unsafe things, no matter their language.
This should have been a larger font, bolded and underlined, and possibly flashing a bright colored background!
JimA
Yup. He stirs up trouble then runs to his military base housing, protected by MPs at the gate.
I first encountered Stephen Miller when he was still at Santa Monica High School. I was called in by a recent graduate of the school whose coming out was forced on him by Miller in an attempt at humiliation. The kid bucked up and pushed back, but the spineless school administration basically ran away and hid after some pro forma mumbling. So the newly minted gay rights activist kid called into a hot line I was helping run, I came out to meet some kids parents teachers at a meeting, and I was stunned by how nasty Miller was, and how expert he was at generating and using fear.
Miller was an extremely deranged kid, apparently (I talked to kids who had known him as early as in elementary school) badly bullied as a little boy, but then built himself a new persona as a bullying racist and homophobe. His continuous rise since the 80’s within the world of angry ignorant coalitions dedicated to take revenge and the weak and vulnerable has been horrifying, and his emergence as the White House’s chief “orange man” whisperer screams of the need for radical reform of the mindset of the entire political classes.
From college days I knew a few radical left wackos who made somewhat the same journey (seeking and living in a politics designed to viscerally assuage childhood ego wounding rather than to see and heal humans, communities and the world…. yeah, who can be for something as lame and dumb sounding as that!).
I’d guess that those common signs aren’t really an issue. The bigger issue is on the highway when there’s one of those portable LED signs saying “Right two lanes ahead closed for construction 12am to 5am, 3/25 - 3/30”. A non English speaker while whizzing by at 65 mi/hr will likely not understand and internalize any of it. Heck, I know a bunch of English speakers that couldn’t fully understand it, but they’d at least get the “right two lanes” and “closed” part of it. So every once in a while, a non-English speaker, who’s been driving for 4 or 5 hours already might miss the meaning that sign, and right where the lanes begin to be closed may still be going 65 mi/hr in the light nighttime traffic, and may accidentally barrel right through the barriers if there’s someone in the left lane beside them.
Also, this issue has little to do with immigration. The rules should be strongly enforced for all people who drive for a living. If you can’t comprehend signs quick enough, you can’t drive stuff/people around.
Remarkable that even as a toddler (Miller was born August 1985), he was on the ‘ascendant’!
Pete
Fun fact, his mom’s name is Rosemary and his dad goes by many names.
I agree with this.
For the most part, I think this is not a major issue. Would I like for them to have the ability to read and comprehend English? Absolutely, but then I think of all the times I rented a car in a foreign country where I did not speak the native language and was not necessarily familiar with all the signs, and often had to drive on the other side of the road - and likely millions of USAsians do that all over the world ever day.
Important? Yes, but probably one of the least important issues.
Two comments:
One, did you drive an 80,000 lb vehicle in the countries where you couldn’t speak the language? Did you drive others around for hire while you were there? I haven’t heard anyone say that foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to rent cars while in the USA on holiday.
Two, most other countries rely MUCH less on words and much more on symbols for roadway signs and directions. Europe for example has 10 or 20 languages and is small enough that you might drive through 3 or 4 countries in a day.
Nope, but I also did not have to attend and pass a Class B CDL class. Now maybe the class is deficient in some manner but it is still a required class.
“Over 550 commercial driving schools in the U.S. are set to close due to safety issues and unqualified instructors, says the Transportation Department.”
DB2
I approve this message.
I also approve the following message:
The DOT’s emergency action is based on what can only be described as statistically insignificant data. Since the beginning of the 2025 calendar year, FMCSA has identified at least five fatal crashes involving non-domiciled CDL holders. To put this in perspective, with 1,600 fatal truck crashes reported through July 2025, these five crashes represent just 0.31% of all fatal truck accidents.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration reported in 2023 that approximately 16% of U.S. truck drivers were born outside the United States. Immigrants are overrepresented in trucking, according to Census data. Whereas 17% of the American workforce is comprised of immigrants, nearly 19% of truck-drivers are foreign born. If foreign-born drivers were inherently more dangerous, their crash rates would be dramatically higher than their representation in the driving population.
The statistics paint a different picture. In fatal large truck crashes in 2021, 72.7% of the large truck drivers had a valid commercial driver’s license (CDL), 22.5% had no CDL, and 1.6% had a CDL that was expired, suspended, revoked, canceled, or disqualified. This data suggests that licensing status, rather than national origin, is the more relevant factor in crash causation.
I’m more concerned about the fly-by-night driving schools that license anybody with a pulse, regardless of their ELP.
Driving stuff and people around is an important job. Unfortunately, the pay scale and standard industry shenanigans don’t reflect its importance. You get what you pay for, that’s probably why so many immigrants are driven to be drivers…
As the US slips further and further into an Idiocracy, we should probably follow suit and use pictures and symbols for all our signage.