(The following article originally appeared in The National Journal on October 16, 2004 and was written by Brian Friel.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Ten years ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement eliminated most of the restrictions on cross-border trade among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But at least one notable American restriction lingers: a U.S. ban against Mexican trucks’ carrying cargo beyond a thin commercial zone in the southwestern border states.
The American and Mexican trucking industries, an international arbitration board, pro-trade lawmakers, and the Bush administration have weighed in on the restriction over the years, all calling for Mexican trucks to be allowed into the United States, as envisioned under NAFTA. Even the Supreme Court got involved, issuing a ruling this summer that was heralded by some free-traders as the end of the ban on Mexican trucks. But the ban still stands. The House last month passed an amendment to the fiscal 2005 transportation spending bill blocking a regulation that would have allowed Mexican long-haul trucks to begin carrying their loads into the U.S. interior.
The Senate is likely to follow suit, despite a veto threat from the White House.
The ban is still alive thanks to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the 1.4 million-member union that represents hundreds of thousands of freight-industry employees.
It would be natural for the union to fear that, absent the restriction, lower-paid Mexican workers might take jobs from Teamsters members. But the Teamsters has chosen, successfully thus far, to focus on safety as the policy area in which to wage its battle, arguing that Mexican trucks would pose a danger to families traveling along American highways.
The American Trucking Associations, which counts 37,000 companies across all 50 states among its members, opposes the Teamsters, arguing that Mexican trucks wouldn’t be much competition and would lead to modest efficiency gains in cross-border trade. But the trucking group’s esoteric argument has fared poorly against the union’s more straightforward pitch.
“The Teamsters will not let up in our fight to protect America’s families from unsafe foreign trucks,” union President James Hoffa said in September.
As part of an anti-Mexican-trucking coalition, Hoffa has enlisted a host of highway safety advocates and environmental watchdogs to help the Teamsters use legal maneuvers to stave off the Mexican trucks. The nonprofit group Public Citizen, for example, was the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, arguing for an in-depth environmental study before the United States allowed the Mexican trucks in. The coalition has heavily lobbied Congress and slowed the regulatory process at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the Transportation Department agency that oversees Mexican truck safety.
The Teamsters union has proved to be a master of grassroots advocacy, garnering overwhelming political support for blocking Mexican trucks. After the Bush administration began the regulatory work necessary to lift the ban, the Teamsters in 2002 rallied bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate to require the motor carrier agency to work 22 criteria into its regulations before allowing Mexican trucks into this country.
That action helped bog down the regulatory process. It also sparked the Supreme Court case, which delayed the lifting of the ban another two years.
In September, the House passed the anti-Mexican-truck amendment by a vote of 339-70, with 141 Republicans joining almost every Democrat on the Teamsters’ side. When President Bush threatened to veto the transportation bill over the amendment, Hoffa played the safety card again. President Bush is “not only ignoring the safety of the traveling public; he’s ignoring the vast majority of his fellow Republicans in the House,” Hoffa said.
Such support shows that the truckers union is an active force throughout the country. It also helps that the group has donated $2 million to political campaigns this year; 90 percent of the money went to Democrats, according to the campaign-spending tracking service PoliticalMoneyLine, but the truckers also contributed to such key Republicans as Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.; Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich.; and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.
“No one has worked a more aggressive grassroots effort on this than Jim Hoffa,” said Ed Wytkind, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department.
Even proponents of Mexican trucks give credit to Hoffa’s union. “I think we know what we are talking about here,” Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., a free-trader, said on the House floor on September 22. “We are talking about one special-interest group — the Teamsters.”
FMCSA spokesman Bill MacLeod said that the border is still closed to long-haul Mexican trucks, that its regulations are still in the clearance process, and that no date has been set for that process to end.
Even if the ban is eventually lifted, Mexican trucks are unlikely to start rolling down America’s highways, several industry representatives said. NAFTA would allow Mexican trucks to carry cargo only from Mexico to a U.S. destination and back, not between U.S. destinations.
But even with Congress on their side, Teamsters members are not idling. They’re pushing hard for John Kerry’s election in the hopes that a Kerry administration would follow the lead of the Clinton administration, which sat on the Mexican-trucking issue, at the Teamsters’ behest, for eight years.
“This is an election year, and for some reason, politicians still think unions are a political force,” said Marc Miles, a trade expert at the Heritage Foundation.