The list of victimless crimes is unfortunately long and quite ugly—covering everything from arranging flowers without a state-issued permission slip to selling booze at certain times of the day.
Make some room near the top of the list for this one. A Canadian trucker was reportedly arrested by the Border Patrol in New Mexico for “unauthorized domestic freight operations.”
Agents in Las Cruces, New Mexico, arrested the driver (who has not been identified publicly) for allegedly hauling cargo in violation of a nonimmigrant visa, Border Patrol Chief Rosario Vasquez wrote in a post on X. Vasquez said the driver faces “prosecution and subsequent deportation.”
Truly, a serious crime that demands the federal government’s attention. What kind of country would America be if people were freely allowed to peacefully deliver goods that had been consensually bought and sold? I bet this guy was getting paid for his labor too! The horror.
This is illegal because of some nakedly protectionist laws that restrict “cabotage,” the transportation of goods within the United States. As TruckNews.com, a trade publication, explains: foreign truck drivers “are permitted to enter the United States to transport international freight…but generally may not haul cargo that is both picked up and delivered within the U.S.”
Trucks and roads work the same way in Canada as they do in the U.S., so this restriction has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with limiting competition for truck driving jobs in America.
That never made much sense, but it’s particularly silly at a time when the U.S. is experiencing a shortage of truck drivers. While there is some debate over the size and seriousness of that shortage, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there will be over 237,000 openings for truck drivers each year for the next decade, due in large part to older workers who are retiring and others who are exiting the industry.
The Trump administration is well aware of that shortfall. Just last week, the federal Department of Transportation launched a new Freedom Haulers Initiative that’s meant to get military veterans and their spouses into trucking careers by easing some licensing requirements.
“These reforms are worthwhile because they reduce government-created barriers, thereby making it easier for qualified workers to enter the labor market,” writes Steve Swedberg, a policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank. However, he’s skeptical that “veteran recruitment can realistically address the scale of the trucking workforce challenge.”
You know what might help? Letting foreign truck drivers work in the U.S. too.
Of course, that would require the Trump administration to rethink its views on immigration.
“The arrest of a Canadian driver signals that the federal government’s expanding cabotage crackdown is not limited to Mexican truckers and could bring greater scrutiny to foreign carriers conducting freight movements throughout the U.S,” notes FreightWaves, an industry publication.
The frustrating thing is that the Trump administration seems to understand, at times, that removing nonsensical barriers to the flow of goods can boost the economy. Just look at how much more commerce is happening since the White House waived enforcement of the Jones Act—another purely protectionist restriction on cabotage—due to the Iran War. By and large, however, the administration is too fixated on tariffs and immigration enforcement to apply this lesson more broadly.
And the really frustrating thing is that an innocent person is facing charges and deportation for something that absolutely should not be a crime.
