Gord Magill, a third-generation Canadian trucker and author of End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, describes a decades-long campaign to de-skill, underpay, and ultimately replace the North American trucking workforce — once the most common job for high school-educated white men in the United States and a symbol of working-class autonomy. What began as deregulation in 1980 evolved into a sustained effort by industry lobbies and government to suppress wages, degrade training, and eventually import foreign labor to fill a “driver shortage” that Magill argues has never actually existed.
The Myth of the Driver Shortage
The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated trucking, opening the market to anyone with $300 and a pulse, which crushed wages and drove experienced drivers out.
Instead of letting the free market correct — by raising pay to attract drivers — the American Trucking Associations (ATA) in 1987 published a bogus study claiming the economy would collapse without 600,000 additional truckers by 1990. The economy did not collapse.
This “shortage” narrative became a permanent lobbying tool. The real problem is a churn and retention crisis: taxpayer-subsidized CDL mills produce drivers who quit once they discover the pay is terrible and the conditions are brutal. Some carriers see 90–100% annual turnover.
The actual bottleneck is detention time — drivers stuck for hours or full days at loading docks without pay. A 2021 MIT researcher told the Biden administration the solution was simply to get trucks moving, not import more drivers. This advice was ignored in favor of ATA propaganda.
The Replacement Operation
Starting under the Biden administration’s open-border policies, tens of millions of migrants entered the U.S., and many funneled into trucking through a pre-existing system designed to exploit cheap labor.
Hundreds of thousands of CDLs have been issued in suspicious or outright illegal ways, many to people who do not meet federal requirements. Investigations by groups like American Truckers United have documented the scale.
A federal regulation on the books since 1937 requires commercial drivers to have command of the English language — to read signs, communicate with law enforcement, and understand safety instructions. In 2016, the Obama administration stopped enforcing it, merely fining violators instead of placing trucks out of service.
Many of these drivers were never truckers in their home countries. They arrived as asylum seekers — often through the “Donkey Route,” a human smuggling pipeline from India through Central America — and were funneled into trucking by co-ethnic operators who provided minimal or no training.
The consequences have been deadly: in 2025 alone, over 30 Americans were killed by illegally present truck drivers. A GoFundMe search for “truck driver Singh” turned up 249 active campaigns by Indian families seeking to repatriate remains or cover medical bills.
How the System Enables Exploitation
Lease-operator and “Driver Incorporated” models indenture drivers to trucks they don’t own, functioning like sharecropping. In Canada, “Driver Incorporated” is a tax-avoidance scheme that leaves drivers unpaid and precarious.
Power-only trucking — pioneered by FedEx and now dominant at Amazon — subcontracts driving to small carriers, many owned by foreign nationals in ethnic enclaves (Elk Grove Village, Glendale, California). These carriers employ co-ethnics on suspicious work visas, without CDLs, or illegally. Roughly 90% of Amazon Relay subcontractors operate this way.
Major carriers like J.B. Hunt, Knight-Swift, and Werner have adopted this model to avoid the costs of compliance, insurance, and employing Americans. They are, in Magill’s phrase, “skin suits” — American in name only.
Chameleon carriers evade accountability by registering under one DOT number, accumulating violations, then shutting down and reopening under a new number. There is an open market for buying and selling these registrations.
Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs), mandated in 2017 for safety, have made safety worse. Drivers paid by the mile drive like maniacs when their hours run out. The devices are routinely back-doored via Telegram by operators in Serbia who rewrite logs. Studies confirm that aggressive driving, speeding, and crashes all increased after the mandate.
Double brokering — where loads are illegally re-brokered through multiple intermediaries, many overseas — enables cargo theft on a massive scale (hundreds of millions to billions of dollars annually). Organized rings, including one in California dubbed the “Singh Organization,” steal entire truckloads.
National Security Implications
Foreign drivers from Moldova, Ukraine, India, Russia, and elsewhere are hauling U.S. military freight on public highways, in violation of regulations requiring approved carriers. Military metadata — base locations, equipment descriptions, movement schedules — is transmitted through ELDs to servers overseas, potentially accessible to adversaries.
The U.S. Postal Service similarly uses non-domiciled, non-English-speaking drivers with poor safety records to haul mail, in violation of its own regulations. An attempt to stop this in October nearly seized up the entire system.
The Cultural and Human Cost
Trucking was once celebrated as the “last American cowboy” — a symbol of autonomy and competence. Magill’s grandfather landed at Normandy on D-Day plus three, came home, and became a trucker. His father and uncles were truckers. He himself has driven in all 48 continental states, on Australian road trains, and on Canadian ice roads.
The job demands real skill: reading mountain grades, managing wind on Wyoming interstates, hauling fuel through Toronto traffic, repairing trailers at −53°F in the Northwest Territories. The industry has systematically de-skilled the job — pushing automatic transmissions, discouraging mechanical self-reliance, and treating drivers as “steering wheel holders” monitored by driver-facing cameras.
Multi-generational American trucking companies have gone bankrupt during the “Great Freight Recession” since 2022, even as foreign-operated carriers proliferate.
Political and Legal Responses
The Trump administration and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have reinstated English language proficiency enforcement, but Magill argues this only “nibbles around the edges.” The economic incentives for brokers and carriers to use exploited foreign labor are too strong for rule changes alone.
Delilah’s Law, introduced by Senator Jim Banks, is named after a girl left with cerebral palsy after being struck by an unlicensed Indian driver. It aims to clamp down on illegal CDL issuance.
A Supreme Court case, Montgomery v. Karibey, addresses whether freight brokers can continue to avoid liability and safety accountability.
A forthcoming lawsuit by Oklahoma trucking companies targets J.B. Hunt, CH Robinson, and TQL, alleging that brokers systematically undercut American carriers by farming loads to unsafe, illegally staffed operations.
Canada Under Carney
Magill, who is Canadian, describes a country in economic and political crisis: youth unemployment is soaring, Chinese companies are buying Canadian mines, and 5 million people on temporary work permits may be allowed to stay.
The Freedom Convoy participants — the “Kutzes 4,” Chris Carbert, Tony Olienek, Chris Barber, and Tamara Lich — were pursued with tens of millions in government spending. Charges of conspiring to murder police officers were thrown out. The Supreme Court’s Mosley decision found Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act was unconstitutional, but no cabinet members resigned. Mark Carney, who wrote op-eds encouraging the crackdown, is now Prime Minister.
Stellantis took $15 billion from the Canadian government and days later announced $13 billion in U.S. investment. Bill C-63 (anti-free-speech legislation) died with the Trudeau government but is being resuscitated as Bill C-9 under Carney.
