Since 2000, organized labor has led the charge for open borders “comprehensive immigration reform” alongside left-wing identity-politics groups like UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), which received $10,000 plus $75,000 to its political action committee in 2025 from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Back then, the AFL-CIO flipped from a mostly restrictionist position on immigration to “an immediate amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and an end to sanctions on employers who hire them.” Now, government worker unions including the AFT are suing to ensure that illegal immigrants or migrants in unstable legal statuses like those awaiting asylum adjudication can drive trucks on U.S. highways.
The migrant commercial driver’s license situation
A series of fatal crashes has focused public attention on the question of who qualifies for a commercial driver’s license (CDL) that authorizes the holder to operate a tractor-trailer, among other commercial vehicles. Further, federal law requires that commercial motor vehicle operators such as truckers must be able to “read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and records.”
After an Indian national trucker who later failed an English proficiency test allegedly made an illegal turn that obstructed oncoming traffic leading to a fatal collision, the Department of Transportation issued emergency rules limiting the visa categories that make foreign nationals eligible for a CDL and restricting the length of time for which a “non-domiciled CDL” for a foreign national may be valid.
According to shipping-industry website Overdrive Online, the absence of such regulations allowed foreign nationals of unstable legal status, especially “parole” such as under the Biden administration’s CHNV program, to obtain CDLs. The site reports:
The short answer to the question, “How do illegal aliens get CDLs?”, then, is that they most likely weren’t considered “illegal” when they got the CDL. Garden variety DMV corruption (with recent examples in Florida and New York) or plain old mistakes (as in Washington) might lead to wrongly issued CDLs for people in the country illegally. But to some extent a foreign citizen is illegally in the country if the president says so. President Biden permitted types of entry and stays in the country that President Trump now does not.
Enter Big Labor
But Everything Leftism, which asserts that “no human is illegal,” does not go down without a court fight. And the role of defender of the dubiously legal migrant truck driver has fallen to Big Labor, specifically the UnidosUS-funding AFT and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The two government-worker unions petitioned the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for review of the Transportation Department’s emergency rules limiting the eligible visa categories.
The unions are supported by other pillars of Everything Leftism. Their lawyers of record include attorneys from Public Citizen, an advocacy group founded by environmentalist and anti-business campaigner Ralph Nader. One of the Public Citizen lawyers said in a statement: “This unlawful rule seems intended to put people authorized to work in the United States out of work, solely because of the prejudices of the Trump administration.”
In the post-Turn at the Millennium era, it makes perfect sense that organized labor, especially its most activist wing in the principally government sector, would push for expanded access to work for questionably legal foreign nationals. After all, as we have noted before:
Taken in the broader context, Big Labor’s turn at the millennium on immigration is an important marker of the rise of social justice unionism, perhaps as important as the election of John Sweeney, who midwifed the turn, as president of the AFL-CIO. Likewise, the shift and the way it is remembered on the left, as a triumph of progressive mutual interest over mere “business unionism” and self-interest, reveals the extent to which even radical leftism is baked within organized labor’s story of itself.
