It is essential to keep the American people safe by requiring truckers in America to demonstrate English proficiency, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) asserted during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday.
Host Matthew Boyle asked Donalds about the legislation the congressman introduced which would require truckers in America to demonstrate English proficiency and would allow the Department of Transportation to test commercial truck drivers in English proficiency at weigh stations across the country.
“Talk to us about this legislation and why it’s so important. By the way, we have a lot of truckers that are listening to this show right now all across the country. I know a lot of them listen to SiriusXM on the Patriot channel here. So your audience is the truckers, and it’s the good guys out there,” Boyle said, asking this in the wake of the tragedy in Florida, where an illegal immigrant truck driver killed three people while making an illegal U-turn.
“After the tragedy that happened in Florida, Governor DeSantis and our Agriculture Commissioner, Wilton Simpson, they launched a strategy of using some of the weigh stations on state roads to do English proficiency checks, and also to check the validity of CDLs [commercial driver’s licenses] for truckers that are on the road in the state of Florida,” Donalds began.
He said he spoke with Simpson, and “asked him about the details of what they were doing” and filed federal legislation.
“It would require that all weigh stations on the interstate highway system, the federal system … [to have] proficiency checks and CDL checks to make sure that one, yeah, your license is there, but two, you have the proficiency of English to be able to read our signs and then be safe on the road,” the congressman said.
“I mean, even for the truck drivers that are out there, the worst thing you want to see is have somebody that can’t even read the signs,” he said, following reports that the illegal immigrant behind the fatal Florida U-turn failed an English language proficiency test and also failed to accurately identify highway traffic signs.
“I’ve driven a lot of highway miles in my life. You know, I can navigate a Honda Accord. What I can’t navigate is a tractor trailer. We want to make sure that everybody’s safe out on these roads. And this is a simple thing to do, and so it’s commonsense policy. And the way we wrote the bill was that the Department of Transportation would enforce this, and if there was a state that blocked the Department of Transportation from trying to enforce this, then we would withhold transportation highway funding,” he said, adding that the blue states that want to remain sanctuaries would not get federal tax money if they refused to comply.
“Hopefully we’ll see this get agenda-ed on Capitol Hill real soon, and we can get this bill moving through Congress,” Donalds added
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