Nearly every American child learns that if they pump their arms up and down when a semi truck goes by they just might get that trucker to honk their horn.
The contrast between our small and weak frames as children, and the size and power of the 18-wheeler was a source of both awe and fear. Awe at the size of cargo – especially the oversized loads – and the force required to move them, and fear at the potential of these massive machines to cause a roadway disaster or a horrible accident. There is something enchanting about big trucks to the young imagination.
As we mature, we come to realize the more mundane, economic reasons for 18-wheelers on our highways, but the enchantment never quite goes away.
Having grown up in a small Texas town and spent my entire life in the state, the cowboy as the embodiment of the Texas ethos has imprinted itself on my mind, and it makes sense to me why truckers are sometimes dubbed the “last cowboys.”
The frontier becomes the wide open road, the cattle drive becomes moving general goods (which can, at times, include cattle), and the hard work to put bread on the table remains the same from one generation to the next. The soundtrack of these deeply American ways of life is American country music, which was birthed from the cowboy, western milieu. Odes to ranch life and long haul trucking are both themes that regularly appear in country music.
However, trucking isn’t just an aesthetic. Trucking is a viable pathway for Americans to make a good living without having to worry about the stress of college or navigating the soul-crushing labyrinth of cubicle-based careers. And if one is particularly dexterous and industrious, becoming an owner-operator or running their own trucking business is a pathway to an even better paycheck.
A 2015 NPR analysis based on 2014 Bureau of Labor Statistics statistics declared that trucking was the most common job for Americans in 29 out of 50 states. Trucking is certainly not a job that “Americans just won’t do.”
Given trucking’s pathway to a good career, low barrier to entry, and the constant demand for trucking services, it should be unsurprising that many immigrants want to take up trucking as a profession. According to one estimate, the number of foreign-born truck drivers on the roads roughly doubled between 2001 and 2021, going from 316,000 to 720,000, and the percentage of foreign-born truck drivers rose to approximately 18% in late 2025. This means that just under 1 in 5 truck drivers in America were born in another country.
That doesn’t even count the illegal immigrants behind the wheel of 18 wheelers – a number that is nearly impossible to accurately count.
While, of course, it is not inherently problematic to be born in another country, it’s not hard to see how large swaths of foreigners operating massive vehicles flying down our highways and interstates at high speeds poses a risk to public safety.
Unsurprisingly, there has been a recent spate of highly publicized truck crashes often leading to multiple fatalities, causing Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to take emergency action in September of 2025 to protect America’s roads. A more recent follow up to this emergency action reportedly taking up to 200,000 immigrant drivers off the roads. Closer to home, the Abbott administration took action on this issue, and the Young Republicans of Texas called for even more stringent measures than those already in place.
Much of the outrage from social commentators and aggrieved families is directed not only at immigrants, but also towards our elites who facilitate the immigration crisis. This is reasonable because our elites have repeatedly failed in their moral duties to protect us.
God Himself establishes governing authorities (Romans 13:1), and just authority is granted by God to those in positions of temporal power. Elsewhere in Scripture we see God’s judgement upon those who do not use their gifts well (James 3:1 or Matthew 25:14-30). There is an expectation of good stewardship of God’s good gifts, and this extends to those who have been granted the gift of earthly authority with the stringency of judgement being commensurate to the degree of the gift.
Although mass immigration has wreaked havoc on the trucking industry – evinced by the size and violence of the crashes and the erosion of an American way of life – its deleterious effects extend far beyond the cab of a semi truck. The effects of mass immigration are palpable for Americans. We feel the eroded civic life and loss of cultural unity, we see the mass layoffs in big companies while they apply to hire thousands of H-1Bs, all while statues of foreign gods are erected in our hometowns and our grocery stories are filled with countless foreign languages.
The deleterious effects of mass immigration are obvious, and are perhaps the largest reason why young people turned so heavily towards President Trump in the 2024 election. Rather than holding signs reading “LOWER TAXES NOW!” or “BALANCE THE BUDGET NOW!,” the attendees to the 2024 RNC infamously held signs reading “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW!”
In addition to enforcing already existing laws requiring immigrants to follow the proper procedures to get behind the week of trucks, mass deportations are a requirement if we want to restore safety on our roads, peace in our culture, and stability in our economy.
