• Wyoming’s lone congressperson wants to codify Trump’s push to require English proficiency among drivers. Reaction was mixed among truckers on I-80.

 

By Andrew Graham, WyoFile.com

In a state where the vast majority of residents are white, the truck stops along Wyoming’s 400 miles of Interstate 80 stand out as racial and linguistic melting pots. 

Among the idling semi-trucks and in the lounge areas where people wait their turn at a shower, drivers speak to each other or into phones in Russian, Spanish, Nepali, Hindi and more. 

To some, including President Donald Trump and supporters of his Make America Great Again political movement, these roadside Babels represent a troubling trend — an increasing number of truck drivers who don’t speak English as a first language — and a public safety threat. 

Over the last two months, the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers, including Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, have moved to take truck drivers who don’t speak a certain level of English off the road.

Federal law has long required commercial truck drivers to possess a certain level of English proficiency. But in 2016, the federal government issued guidance that while drivers could be cited if a law enforcement officer found they failed to meet that requirement, they could also drive on. 

On April 28, Trump reversed that policy and instituted a new crackdown. Beginning June 25, Wyoming Highway Patrol officers, along with their counterparts in other states, will work under new guidelines that call for them to test the English of drivers they interact with if they suspect a lack of language proficiency. Drivers could face those tests if pulled over on suspicion of a traffic offense, or during inspections that sometimes occur at weigh stations and the state’s port-of-entry facilities. 

If drivers fail the roadside test, they’ll be taken out of service — forced to park their truck until a different driver can reach Wyoming and take the wheel. Among immigrant truck drivers, that burdensome consequence has raised concerns about the arbitrariness of patrol officers and inspectors conducting language exams. 

Hageman has championed the issue, and this month announced her cosponsorship of legislation to codify Trump’s executive order into law — meaning a future president couldn’t just relax the enforcement requirement again.

A spokesperson for Hageman did not respond to an email requesting an interview with Wyoming’s lone representative. 

 

Trucker response

It’s a crackdown drawing mixed reactions among truck drivers passing through Wyoming. 

“I’m a native Russian speaker, but I feel it was my obligation to learn English,” Grey Kiroff, who has been driving trucks in the United States since 2002, told a WyoFile reporter Wednesday, after stepping down from his cab at Love’s Travel Stop outside Laramie. 

“This is an absolute necessity, it’s not just a good idea,” he said. 

But others considered the new emphasis on English proficiency another prong in the Trump administration’s assault on the country’s immigrant workers. 

“I have seen people who don’t speak English do this job really well,” one driver, who said he’d immigrated to the United States but declined to share his name or country of origin, told WyoFile. Lacking English proficiency is “not a barrier” to safe driving, the driver said, speaking to WyoFile next to his truck while stopped at the Akal Travel Center 20 miles further west. 

Another driver there, who spoke to a reporter in Spanish, said he could not converse in English but was perfectly capable of reading road signs. He also declined to share his name, as did several opponents of the Trump administration’s rule change, saying they did not want to draw attention to themselves.

Tightening the language requirement, the Spanish-speaking driver said, would hurt an economy that depended on many immigrant drivers.

Nearly every truck driver interviewed by WyoFile agreed people need to be able to read road signage to some degree — particularly in Wyoming and the Mountain West, where signs identify steep grades or warn of inclement weather. 

“The hills are messed up,” Ron Brown, a driver from Pennsylvania, said. “If guys don’t know how to read the signs, they’re not even going to drop the Jake.” Brown was referring to using the engine brake on a long downslope, which can keep a truck from blowing its brakes and beginning an out-of-control descent.    

“I don’t feel that it’s racist, I feel that it’s necessary,” Kim Starr, a driver from California, said. 

But drivers disagreed on whether significant numbers of truckers were on the road, who couldn’t hit that threshold of English proficiency.

Inside the Akal travel center, reputed for a small restaurant churning out Indian cuisine, an employee said the many drivers he interacts with all have a sufficient grasp of English. Long-distance truck drivers crash because they’re using their phones or watching videos while driving, or they’re intoxicated, or they fall asleep at the wheel, said the employee, who gave his first name as Jamal but declined to share a last name.

“It’s not about the language,” Jamal said. “It’s all politics.”

 

Roadside test

Wyoming Highway Patrol officials provided WyoFile with a copy of the new testing rules, issued May 20 by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The new regulation calls for officers to first ask drivers a series of questions, such as “how long have you been driving today?” or “did you perform your pre-trip inspection before you started driving today?”

If officers decide someone is unable to respond well enough to those questions in English, they can take the driver out of service, preventing them from traveling on. If the drivers pass that portion of the test, however, officers are also directed to quiz the driver on traffic signs. 

The guidance obtained by WyoFile includes 37 images of highway signs. Officers are instructed to quiz drivers on four of them — and drivers must properly identify at least three to pass the test. 

Officers can pick from a set of signs that vary widely, from a simple speed limit sign to a sign stating “trucks over 10 tons must enter weigh station next right.” 

In Wyoming, troopers will escort a truck driver who fails the test, if it’s administered along the side of the highway, to the next good stopping point, Lt. Colonel Karl Germain told WyoFile.

Immigrant truck drivers are concerned about the potential for bias as state troopers and inspectors are given the power to determine a legal level of English. “Accents, cultural differences, or imperfect grammar should not be a reason to end someone’s career,” an online petition calling for federal regulators to rethink Trump’s executive order states. The petition had more than 7,500 signatures as of Friday. It also notes that with just 60 days from order to implementation, truck drivers and companies haven’t had time to prepare for the English tests. 

“We all contribute to this country, and we all deserve equal respect on the road,” the petition, which does not note an author, says.

Long-standing industry instability and legitimate public safety concerns are mixing with the current political climate, University of Minnesota economics professor and former long-haul truck driver Stephen Burks told WyoFile. Trucking companies have become places of high turnover, where drivers are worn down by firms’ desires to keep them on the road and away from home for long periods, coupled with often low pay, Burks, who studies the industry with an emphasis on labor economics, said.

Amid those pressures, and amid the impacts of free-trade agreements that allowed Canadian and Mexican drivers into the country in increasing numbers, American truck drivers have long worried about immigrants who accept lower pay and companies that skirt rules to bring in cheaper drivers. Companies that might bend the rules on foreign drivers are also likely to worry less about regulations that increase driver and motorist safety, Burks said. 

Regulating drivers’ English addresses those various anxieties.

“This English proficiency thing is kind of a new variant on the same concern, and it naturally meshes for the Trump folks with the anti-immigrant sentiment,” he said. “Is there a legitimate underlying issue? Yes, there is. I can not tell you how big it is.”

 

Connor’s Law 

Supporters of the crackdown, like Hageman, point to specific tragedies. The bill Hageman is cosponsoring is called Connor’s Law, and is named after Connor Dzion, an 18-year-old who was killed by a semi-truck driver in 2017, on Interstate 95 in Florida. I-95 is the principal north-south highway along the East Coast. 

Dzion’s family sued two truck companies, and a jury issued a $1 billion damage verdict after finding drivers for both companies were distracted and responsible for Dzion’s death. 

One driver, a Russian immigrant, created a mile-long traffic backup after crashing his tractor trailer, Jacksonville, Florida-based attorney Curry Pajcic, who litigated the case for the Dzions, told WyoFile. That driver was on drugs and watching pornography on a cell phone when he crashed, Pajcic said.

Dzion, in a Toyota Corolla his parents gifted him on his 16th birthday, was the last car in the traffic backup. A second truck driver, an Indian immigrant to Canada who had been driving for 25 hours straight from Montreal, smashed into Dzion and killed him. 

That driver drove by multiple signs warning of stopped traffic, keeping “the hammer down on cruise control at 70 mph,” Pajcic said. The truck crested a low rise in the road and hit the traffic on the other side. The driver was allowed to return to Canada after the crash, according to Pajcic. As a result, lawyers were unable to get his cell phone data or post-crash drug test results. 

Pajcic’s team proved the driver had falsified his driving logs, the attorney said, and they proved he couldn’t read signs in English in depositions. 

It’s possible the language barrier was one factor among others, Pajcic said, but he believed if the driver could have understood the signs, he may have slowed down in time. “There’s a reason the rules say ‘you gotta read [expletive] English,’ if you don’t you’re gonna kill someone,” Pajcic said. 

He and Dzion’s parents have worked with lawmakers on Connor’s Law, he said, because even if other factors are involved in such crashes, they believe stricter enforcement of English language proficiency could save lives. “We never want there to be another Connor,” he said. Pajcic too, though, said he thought the new rules could also protect jobs for U.S. drivers. 

“It takes away American jobs,” he said of companies bringing in foreign drivers. “It drives down the quality of our drivers and we need to protect American roads.”

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.