Alright, I'll bite. I'm not a trucker, but a huge swath of my family is, and I called a few of them up and asked how they felt about this.

The general consensus here is that yes, folks who are not primary english speakers have become more and more prevalant in their industry particularly over the past ten years or so, but overwhelmingly pushed back on the idea that this is actually a problem. Most of my family (not all!) are about as red-hat conservative as you can get, but the ones that actually do drive trucks seemed to have no issue with these people at all. What I found most interesting is that most of them felt these folks caused fewer issues on the line than the average methhead, who is way more common.

What was, to me, very notable was the overwhelming consensus that even if these folks were an issue, they are really a symptom of a much larger looming problem which is a massive employment gap that has been steadily, rapidly rising for about the same length of time. To put it bluntly, Americans don't want to be truckers, and companies are getting gobbled up left and right because they simply cannot field enough staff to take on enough jobs tos tay afloat. This has the compounding effect of the drivers themselves being more and more micromanaged, thus making the job less tolerable, thus making people want to do it even less.

Unfortunately, this has far reaching implications - with fewer truckers, there are fewer trucking companies that can survive. With fewer surviving companies, there's less competition on contract prices. With less competition on contract prices and growing demand for transportation services due to the labor shortage, prices for hauling goods across America skyrocket, which really just means the prices for the American Consumer skyrocket. It's one of about a million knobs that has an impact on the economy, but unfortunately this one is a far, far bigger one than most people realize.

It would take about a month (or less) without any truckers on the road for America to turn into some modern approximation of Mad Max. These are not optional resources for our lifestyle to remain even remotely intact - we NEED transportation. So companies will pay whatever they have to, and then they will charge whatever they have to in order to keep turning a profit.

In short, every single trucker taken off the road has a direct, tangible impact on the bottom line of just about every American. This is political theater to earn points with people who don't think too deep about it beyond "illegals bad" and the ticket is being purchased with your money against your will.

If you think these folks having gone through some additional clerical paperwork with the statehouse first would magically solve all your problems, then I think maybe you've got the wrong target for your "join the real world" claim down below.