Dear Representative:
On behalf of the AFL-CIO, I urge you to oppose Dalilah’s Law (H.R. 5688), as currently drafted. This bill would undermine public safety, create needless disruptions in public services and supply chains critical to our economy, and create a discriminatory exclusion of immigrant workers with lawful work authorization that would hurt all working families.
Workers with commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) make our country run and provide a wide range of important services. They carry children to and from school. They drive millions of people to and from work on buses. They ensure our communities are clean through sanitation and recycling pickup. They support our nation’s utility infrastructure, manufacturing plants and airports. And they carry commercial freight across U.S. highways and along our roads and city streets so that we can get the things we need to live and support our families.
H.R. 5688 would prohibit nearly 200,000 workers with lawful work authorization, including many union members, from renewing their CDLs and would prohibit thousands more from obtaining new licenses. Despite being promoted as a vehicle to increase public safety, H.R. 5688 would have quite the opposite effect. In fact, when the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) first issued an interim final rule attempting to implement many of the provisions of this bill, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that it was likely unlawful because, while DOT premised its rule on safety, its own data indicated that the CDL holders excluded by the rule (immigrant drivers) were involved in fatal crashes at a lower rate than CDL holders who are not excluded, meaning the rule would worsen, and not improve, the rate of CDL fatal crashes.
In its attempt to justify the policies encompassed in H.R. 5688, DOT has cherry picked, from the tens of thousands of fatal accidents per year, a handful of examples caused by people with noncitizen status. But there is no evidence showing a correlation between immigration status and unsafe driving, a fact that DOT admitted in their initial rule issuance, which explained that “[t]here is not sufficient evidence, derived from well-designed, rigorous, quantitative analyses, to reliably demonstrate a measurable empirical relationship between the nation of domicile for a CDL driver and safety outcomes in the United States such as changes in frequency and/or severity of crashes or changes in frequency of violations.”
H.R. 5688 won’t only make us less safe, it will also create service disruptions in critical services and industries. For example, because of DOT’s efforts to implement the policies encompassed in H.R. 5688, school districts are having to transfer and turn away workers currently being trained to serve as school bus drivers, depriving those workers of the opportunity to build their skills and disrupting the services that students and their families rely on to get students to school. As described by multiple AFL-CIO affiliate unions in comments opposing DOT’s rule, it will also disrupt transit, intercity bus service, national electrical infrastructure, mining, manufacturing, road and highway department work, food delivery, and sanitation services, among others.
For the reasons above, we urge you to protect working families and public safety by voting NO on the Dalilah’s Law as currently drafted.
Sincerely,
Jody Calemine
Director, Government Affairs