Mexican Trucking Blues

The Supreme Court decided yesterday to relieve the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration from the responsibility of doing an environmental impact statement and Clean Air Act conformity declaration on its promulgation of regulations that will once again allow Mexican truckers, barred from these shores since 1982 by act of Congress, to start doing long-haul trucking into these United States. (If you need to know more, examine Clarence Thomas' decision for the unanimous court in Department of Transportation v. Public Citizen here.)

I did a radio show on the topic defending more open international trade in the context of this case against representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the California Trucking Association today on KPCC-FM in Los Angeles. I'm delighted to report that public opposition to increased openness in international trade is still largely based on "protect my job at all costs to everyone else" (the truckers) or "free trade is great, as long as all our trading partners face the exact same regulatory strictures and use all the same equipment, methods, and techniques as we do." All in all a nice status quo strategy that guarantees we'll keep the world's less-well-off out of the loop of international commerce that can help make them rich.

Comments

[thoreau]

Paging Lonewacko! Paging Lonewacko!

[Gary Gunnels]

thoreau,

Can you give us readers at home some context, you sexy physicist? 🙂

[Mark Fox]

Past Commercial Driver License requirements and more significant recent changes in the hours-of-service rules for US truckers have led to a shortage of drivers. Perhaps just in time, allowing Mexican labor into the pool will prevent US consumers from paying the higher costs associated with the increased regulation.

[The Lonewacko Blog]

Furthermore, I believe that Former North Carolina Commissioner of Motor Vehicles Edward L. Powell, Republican candidate for the Fifth Congressional District, is one of those XRM-SBAHs. In fact, just today he strongly condemned the recent Supreme Court decision that allows Mexican trucks to use the highways of the United States:

Powell said, ?This is another direct result of the disastrous North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has already virtually destroyed our textile and furniture industries in the Fifth District. NAFTA now threatens to destroy another vital part of the Fifth District, our trucking industry and its drivers and employees, in addition to the potentially deadly highway safety considerations."

?As the former head of highway safety in North Carolina, I can foresee deadly consequences for our citizens with these mechanically faulty Mexican trucks driven by non English speaking, inexperienced reckless drivers on American streets and highways. In addition, these Mexican trucking companies will take away large portions of our trucking business from our trucking companies in the Fifth District destroying these jobs just like ?free trade? has destroyed our textile and furniture jobs. I can foresee the strong likelihood of Mexican trucks hauling drugs and other contraband into our country with our eagerness to do ?free trade."

What a XRM-SBAH! Let the trucks come! Wealth for all!

[David Innes]

Having spent quit a lot of time with and alongside short- and long-haul truckers, having seen first-hand what happens when a trucker falls asleep at the wheel, having seen first-hand what happens when a truck suffers mechanical failure at high speed, having seen first-hand what happens when a trucker crosses a dividing line into a small car full of teen-age girls, I don't see unregulated trucking as an entirely cost-free enterprise.

In general the economy will benefit enormously both because shipping costs will be lower and more shipping capacity will become available. What costs there are, however, will tend to be borne by private individuals, their families, and their health insurers.

Requiring that randomly selected individuals bear the costs of a public good sort of goes against basic tenets of Libertarianism.

- The government could mitigate the burden (in cases of injury though not obviously death) by providing health care for accident victims.

- Or the government could mitigate the burden by seeking to limit such accidents to a level equal to the status quo.

- Or the government could really level the playing field by easing regulations on all trucking to a level consistent with a North American-wide lowest common denominator and letting the rest of us know that if we don't like we can stay off the sidewalks.

But none of those three more correctly Libertarian things are happening and you're still gloating about it. What's with that? You just like carnage or are you pretending it won't happen?

(I would add that I carry no brief against Mexican trucks or truckers per se. I'm more concerned about the further off-the-books corners that will be cut by individual truckers -- the ones I used to know and occasionally had to dodge -- in order to keep up.)

David Innes

[The Lonewacko Blog]

Also, this article is a few years old, but the issue is still ignored by our (current) "leaders": 'Mexican Aggression And Its American Collaborators':

Armed with a population that doubles every 24 years and strengthened by the overwhelming popularity of their newly-elected president, [Mexico is] launching a demographic war against the U.S. A multi-million man army of colonists, euphemistically referred to as "undocumented migrants," is pouring into the U.S. with help and support from Mexicans who have entrenched themselves here already, from Latino fifth-column organizations, and from commercial interests hungry for cheap labor, many of them multinationals who openly boast of their lack of national loyalty.

...The Mexican Embassy's NAFTA office recently issued a statement that they "expect the U.S. to comply" with NAFTA's recent decision to allow free access of Mexican trucks to American roads in spite of the serious hazard of poorly maintained trucks that don't meet U.S. safety standards...

...Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda has presented a list of demands regarding 18 million Mexicans living in the U.S., about one third of them illegal, including the demand that America "respect their human rights," i.e. not enforce its own laws. They claim that the measures undertaken to deter illegal border crossings endanger the lives of the perpetrators, whom they describe as "threatened by the U.S. Border Patrol," and have called on the U.N. to deploy troops.

...Despite claiming a desire to assimilate when in front of gullible mainstream American audiences, many Latinos already in the U.S. have basically ceased being loyal to this country. Although some Mexican Americans have always been loyal to this country, (see the movie Lone Star for an example) they are increasingly outnumbered by their disloyal cousins. This isn't just a matter of throwing rocks at the US soccer team when it played Mexico in Los Angeles a few years ago. They loudly demand an amnesty and voting rights for illegal aliens, protest against deportations of criminals who are illegally in the U.S, and threaten to sue local authorities if police are allowed to enforce the U.S.immigration laws or to refuse driver's licenses to illegals. And the mainstream media act as if all these things don't happen or else openly side with the defenders of illegality and anti-Americanism...

...Mexico's pursuit of her national interest at our expense is understandable.What is incomprehensible is the open collaboration of some Americans, masked by a thick coating of political correctness... The tragedy of it all is that, given our fundamentally absolute superiority of power over Mexico, we could end all this nonsense simply by standing firm on fundamental and obvious issues like our right to enforce our own laws and keep our own culture. We wouldn't even have to do anything nasty to make the point. But if our own decadent willingness to hand over our country to an aggressive foreign power remains painfully obvious, the Mexicans will be fools not to continue to exploit it. We educated half their elite at Harvard and the University of Chicago, so of course they are bright enough to figure out what's going on. The biggest puzzle is how we expect them to respect a nation that clearly doesn't respect itself. It's time we did, for our sake and, in the long run, their own.

[SM]

thoreau,

Next time you feel an urge to page somebody -> don't !

[Gadfly]

Ahh, it's good to see some good old fashioned racism come out in the name of "safety". Haven't seen this since Driving While Black became illegal.

Did you know that 28% of all American trucks flunk safety inspections? Yeah, but Mexican trucks flunk them 45% of the time at the border crossings, you say. Here's the story:

Current border trucking restrictions for shipments entering the U.S. require a costly three-truck delivery dance. Since the cargoes are required to be transferred to an American truck within a few miles of the border, shipments involve a long-haul Mexican truck, then a transfer on their side of the border to a drayage truck, which hauls the shipment across the border, and then another transfer to an American long-haul truck.

Since the drayage trucks involved spend much of their time idling in line to cross the border, and then immediately offload to other trucks, they are the oldest, most run-down and polluting trucks in use, which dramatically increase border pollution. And they make up a large proportion of border crossings by Mexican trucks, providing horror-story images which American protectionists have used and reused to maintain their insulation from Mexican truck competition.

More here: http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1509

[Trollumination]

Trucks can be dangerous as hell. The last thing we need is to bring in unregulated Mexican trucks to wreak even more havoc on the roads, just so that a few truckers making $40,000 a year can be replaced by truckers making $10,000 a year.

Now, that alone isn't so bad - I mean, fuck the working man, right? - but hey, if they're cutting corners on the DRIVER then do you really think they'll be honest with the TRUCK as well? I mean, suing a Mexican company is lots harder than suing an American company - for practical purposes, they're immune to judgements. Let the carnage begin!

It's one thing to close down a safe, modern, American factory and replace it with a dangerous one in China that uses prisoners and indentured child labor (oh, how Libertarian it is to trade with slavers! how totally ideologically pure!) - but then, even if there is a mess, it's somewhere else.

But bringing the mess here - that violates OUR rights.

[David Innes]

"Current border trucking restrictions for shipments entering the U.S. require a costly three-truck delivery dance. Since the cargoes are required to be transferred to an American truck within a few miles of the border, shipments involve a long-haul Mexican truck, then a transfer on their side of the border to a drayage truck, which hauls the shipment across the border, and then another transfer to an American long-haul truck.

Since the drayage trucks involved spend much of their time idling in line to cross the border, and then immediately offload to other trucks, they are the oldest, most run-down and polluting trucks in use, which dramatically increase border pollution. And they make up a large proportion of border crossings by Mexican trucks, providing horror-story images which American protectionists have used and reused to maintain their insulation from Mexican truck competition."

and

"As a resident of New Mexico, I have to say it is difficult to imagine that trucks from Old Mexico will be in any worse shape, drive any more insanely, or otherwise provide any worse anything than the broken down wrecks and other wheeled drecks that we have all over this particular state. "

Both good points.

1) It's foolish to do the three-way border dance. If a truck's cargo is crossing the border the best way to do it is on the truck, with the driver. Whichever way it goes, though, it ought to meet consistent standards of safety and emission controls. If you don't care about your kid's asthma (or if you have an employer who forks over for their medication through insurance) then you probably want standards universally lower. If you don't want San Diego's air as brown as Mexico City's you probably want it higher. Either way is fine (though I vote for the later) but unless it's consistent the treaty creates a regulatory/economic disparity.

2) The carnage I mentioned above all occurred at the hands of American truckers. I don't know enough Mexican truckers to form an opinion. From personal experience with non-interstate, and thus less regulated, coal trucking in the Southeast, and log trucking in the Northwest, the idea of further downward pressure is unnerving.

3) Furthermore if we were talking about cross-border bicycle messengers or pizza deliveries, where the gross vehicle weight tends to be under 5,000 pounds, emmission controls tend to be consistent, then enlightened self-interest wouldn't enter into it. But Trucks are heavy, their smoke is seriously bad stuff, they're involved in a tremendous number of accidents, and only idiots (or ideological extremists) relish the prospect of things becoming worse just to score points.

4) Lest people think this will affect only border states I understand there's some bizarre scheme afoot to employ NAFTA-permitted trucks and truckers for short-haul shipping between Customs-warded "international" containerized freight facilities in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. Whatever the merits of cross-border trucking this smacks of the same system-gaming nonsense provided by casinos located on landlocked "boats" and reservations. If you want to do it let everybody do it, anywhere, and be done with it. Otherwise you're just creating government-sanctioned imbalances. Again, unless I'm missing something, it's not the sort of thing I'd expect Libertarians to be praising.

David Innes

[Rancho no lehace]

Every year I have to deal with 1000 to 1200 wetbacks that trespass across my ranch which is 45 miles from the Rio Bravo. Now I`ll have to deal with 18 wheeler wetbacks on hwy. 90 when I go to town. Thanks a bunch Government enablers!
Hey Lonewacko you want to buy a little rancho in SW Texas?

[Garth]

As a resident of New Mexico, I have to say it is difficult to imagine that trucks from Old Mexico will be in any worse shape, drive any more insanely, or otherwise provide any worse anything than the broken down wrecks and other wheeled drecks that we have all over this particular state.

In one way they might be a welcome change: they probably would not cross the border in an obviously drunken state whilst on this side we have a serious problem...... But then again, most of America thinks that we are already on the other side of the border.

[thoreau]

Next time you feel an urge to page somebody -> don't !

Good point!

[Mark Fox]

Is it part of the law that Mexican trucks and drivers will not have to comply with any Federal equipment and hours regulation? Seems unlikely, but I'm not certain.

I am certain that foreign carriers will not be exempt from weight regulations. Jorge, just like Michel and Bubba, will have to stop at the scalehouse entering every State. Likely, too, will be fuel-tax reporting requirements for carriers seeking authority to operate widely in the US.

We're not the EU, with one broad license, but a collection of States, each with the power to enforce its own jingoistic legislation.

[BayDevil]

My God. If any one of the Framers was forced to read that syllabus, he would vomit. What a mess.

[The Lonewacko Blog]

Actually, fyodor, I don't have a problem with Mexican trucks crisscrossing this great land. Sure, many of them might not even have a rudimentary knowledge of English, but, English isn't our official language and it doesn't matter anyway. Anyone can understand something like 'bridge out' regardless of language. Sure, there might be a few accidents, but if anyone complains we can just call them xenophobic racist mean-spirited bigoted anti-humans (hereinafter "XRM-SBAH") like we always do. Plus, if they cause an accident they can go back to Mexico and not be extradited, and it won't get as much media attention. Plus, they drive trucks that Americans won't drive. And, those XRM-SBAHs that get put out of work by 20-hour-a-day Mexican truckers will increase our demand for retraining courses at community colleges, leading to wealth for all!

It's a win-win, I tells ya.