California Gives Illegal Truck Driver a License—3 Americans Pay the Price

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I, each week, drive about 425 miles round trip from my farm residence in Central California to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. And over the last 20 years, I’ve noticed that it is not just that the California infrastructure has gotten much worse as the population has incrementally increased to 41 million people.

We have an infrastructure of the 1970s, when we had 20 million people. And now we have twice the number of people driving and the infrastructure is even worse than it was 50 years ago. And we may have somewhere around 100 million cars or 140 million cars, the estimates range, in California register.

But what I’m getting at is this: It’s very dangerous now to drive on California freeways. There are either two lanes or three lanes, maximum. And we’ve had a new trend where truck drivers will get in the middle lane, on a three-lane freeway, and just stay there. And then you have two lanes of solid truck traffic and only one lane—in the left, if it’s three lanes—for cars. The truck drivers seem not to be as respectful of traffic as in the past.

I bring this up because an illegal alien, Harjinder Singh from India, crossed over into the United States illegally in 2018. And he was ordered to leave. He ignored that during the Biden administration. He was issued a work permit that was revoked by the Trump administration later when it came in.

But that’s controversial, but what is not controversial? Singh, who could not read or speak English, essentially, could only identify one or two traffic signs, for some reason was given a work permit. But more importantly, he was given a California driver’s license, even though he was known to be an illegal alien and not proficient in English.

And California thinks that as the home of the most illegal aliens in the country—a state in which 27% of the people were not born in the United States and it has the largest sanctuary city infrastructure, where they do not comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests to deport criminal illegal aliens—that it’s unique and it’s self-contained. It’s not. People that it grants licenses to or residence to, who are here illegally and are not familiar with traffic laws, they go all over the United States.

So, what happened this past week, Singh was driving a semi-truck in Florida, and for some reason he decided—a major thoroughfare—that he was just going to make a U-turn and cut across the divider and go in the opposite direction, in the middle of fast-moving traffic. And so, the inevitable happened. As he’s making this turn, his own camera shows him nonchalantly looking around as a car has no choice but to hit his semi-trailer. And two people were killed instantly. The third died in the hospital.

What was very disturbing was the expression on Singh’s face. It was calm. He looked around. It was almost as if, “Oh. I made a U-turn. Somebody hit my truck. I wonder what happened?” He didn’t get out and try to help anybody. He stood at the side of the road, finally.

But why was he driving? He was driving because California issued him a license when they knew he was an unlawful resident of the United States and he was not proficient in English, at least enough to be able to read rudimentary traffic signs and signals.

In other words, he killed three people. And he’s now charged with vehicular manslaughter because of the lax policy of California.

What I’m getting at is, when I drive, I see a lot of drivers like that. I don’t know what their immigration status is. I don’t know where they’re born. All I know is that there are so many trucks on the California freeway. The infrastructure is so poor and this generation of truck drivers does not abide by the prior courtesies and policies of previous generations of truck drivers. It makes driving in California an experience like “Road Warrior” or “Mad Max.” And the trucks dominate, sometimes, all the lanes for periods of time on California freeways. And more importantly, they drive outside of California.

So, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is in a fight with President Donald Trump—back and forth—who issued him a temporary work permit. But I think Gavin Newsom, who champions the cause of unlawful immigrants, is going to lose that argument against Donald Trump, who tries to deport them.

But more importantly, it’s beyond controversy. Gavin Newsom’s California issued this man a driver’s license. This man was not a U.S. citizen. He was not here legally, and he could not read or write English, apparently. And the wages of that, we found out in Florida, were the death of three innocent people. And no remorse. No apologies on the part of California or Gavin Newsom.

Bottom line: California is dangerous to itself, in a myriad of ways, but it’s also dangerous to everybody outside of California because its pathologies are not contained within its borders.

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