Montana is CRAWLING w/ Foreign Truck Drivers, No English

Talk to truckers here in Montana and they will tell you, Montana is crawling with foreign truck drivers and truck drivers that don't speak English.

This issue is in the spotlight following a deadly crash involving an illegal alien who killed three people following an illegal u-turn on the interstate in Florida.

John Jackson joins me every Tuesday on the radio. This week, we talked about all of the foreign truck drivers on the roads here in Montana.

John Jackson: "I'll go through that one truck stop over there at Three Forks to fill up and get a snack or whatever. I'm in there for all of maybe 90 seconds, two minutes, and you walk in there and you can't understand the language of half the drivers in there, and half of them look exactly like that one guy out of Florida. I'm telling you, these people are everywhere. I mean just go to a truck stop sometime. Next time you're out on the road on a trip, gas up at one of these truck stops, and you'll see what I mean."

We then got a very interesting phone call from Jim Verhoef in Malta. Jim has a lot of experience in the trucking industry. At one time, he served on the national board of an organization representing the owner operator truck drivers here in the US.

Jim Verhoef: "12 years on the board of directors of the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association. I've got about 42 years in the transportation industry, 31 on the trucking side, and 11 on the train side. So I got a little little background in it. But this issue has been near and dear to my heart for a long time. The current administration, they basically re implemented the 49 CFR 390 1.11 part 2b which is the English speaking requirement for commercial truck drivers in the United States. Previously, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, the CBSA, which is an NGO who sets the out of service criteria for the FMCSA. Just little background on it- Federal Carrier Safety Administration- but they set the out of service criteria, and they can basically tell the FMCSA enforce this or don't enforce this. And that's what they did, I think was back in 15 where they told them all it's no longer an out of service criteria for an English speaking driver to put them out of service. They thought that was, you know, offensive, if you will, to put it nicely. But so, yeah, I mean, as that other gentleman said, we've had a lot of foreigners in this country driving, and I'm sure a lot of them are doing it legally, but if per that statute that I quoted, they are not able to read, write and communicate in the English language in order to converse with law enforcement, public officials and the general public, and to be able to fill out reports and read signs they should not be driving a commercial vehicle."

Jim also told us that Montana has strong laws on the books to protect our roadways from foreign truckers who don't know the rules of the road, but those rules getting undermined by states like California. He also says that he is seeing a lot of foreign truckers along Highway 2 on the Hi Line- with many coming out of Canada.

Here's the full audio from Tuesday's show where we talked about this topic with John Jackson and Jim from Malta.