My dad didn't need much English to do his job

WASHINGTON Trump’s order calls for the enforcement of an existing requirement that truckers be proficient in English, overturning a 2016 policy that inspectors shouldn’t cite or suspend troqueros as long as they could communicate sufficiently, including through an interpreter or smartphone app

- Gustavo Arellano, Tribune News Service

When Donald Trump signed an executive order last week cracking down on truckers who don't speak the best English, there was one industry expert I needed to call: my dad. Lorenzo Arellano drove big rigs across Southern California for 30 years before retiring in 2019. His six-day workweeks kept us well-fed and clothed and allowed him to afford a three-bedroom Anaheim home with a swimming pool, where he and my youngest brother still live today.

"Why does that crazy man want to do this?" he asked me over the phone in Spanish before answering his own question. “It’s because (Trump has) always had a lack of respect for the immigrant. We truckers don't deserve this. He’s just trying to harm people. He wants to humiliate the whole world.”

Federal regulations punishing immigrant truckers for their limited English dates back to the 1930s. Trump’s order calls for the enforcement of an existing requirement that truckers be proficient in English, overturning a 2016 policy that inspectors shouldn't cite or suspend troqueros as long as they could communicate sufficiently, including through an interpreter or smartphone app.

Conservatives have long tied that Obama-era action and the rise of immigrant truckers — they now make up 18% of the profession, according to census figures — to a marked increase in fatal accidents over the last decade, which Trump alluded to when he insisted that “America’s roadways have become less safe.”