Simply letting Mexican trucks, with underpaid and overworked drivers, ply US roads consigns American safety standards to the scrapheap. Here, in a nutshell, is the problem of naive globalization. In theory, the world has become one seamless market. Get rid of archaic barriers and commerce will flourish to the benefit of all. But global commerce, like national commerce, rests on longstanding rules painstakingly negotiated over decades and centuries.
Trucking is an instructive case in point.
An audit report by the US Transportation Department found that with some 3.5 million commercial trucks entering the United States from Mexico yearly, there were exactly 13 federal border inspectors. Just half of one percent of such trucks were actually inspected - and half were turned back at the border for serious safety violations. Arizona and Texas crossings had no truck inspection facilities at all. Moreover, if Mexico, with one-seventh the wage rate, could freely send trucks into domestic US hauling, the US trucking industry would face crippling pressure to cut its own standards and wages or go out of business. Many trucking companies would simply relocate home offices across the Mexican border and hire low-wage Mexican drivers.