Sikh Truckers, Immigration Enforcement, and the Racialized Landscape of U.S. Capitalism
On 21 October 2025, a catastrophic pile-up occurred on the westbound lanes of Interstate 10 near Ontario in San Bernardino County, California, when a semi-tractor-trailer ploughed into a line of slowed or stopped vehicles, killing three people and injuring multiple others. The driver, 21-year-old Jashanpreet Singh of Yuba City, was initially arrested under suspicion of driving under the influence of drugs. According to the criminal complaint, investigators cited dash-cam footage that appears to show the truck failing to brake and colliding into vehicles, including other large trucks. Singh was also identified by federal authorities as an Indian national who entered the United States in 2022, crossing the southern border. His immigration status quickly became a focal point for debate. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lodged a detainer and the crash was seized as evidence in broader discussions of immigration, commercial licensing, and public-safety oversight.
In the aftermath of the crash, the story quickly became entangled with broader debates about immigration and trucking regulation under the Donald Trump administration’s legacy, particularly as it relates to immigrant drivers - including many from the Sikh community. According to Sikh Coalition and other civil-rights observers, the new enforcement regime requires states to verify lawful presence before issuing or renewing commercial driver’s licences (CDLs) and has introduced stricter English-proficiency tests for drivers. For example, U.S. officials revealed that over 7,000 truck drivers were declared “out of service” after failing roadside English tests, many of whom are of Indian or Sikh origin .Media coverage of the 21 October crash involving the 21-year-old Indian-born driver, Jashanpreet Singh, emphasised that he entered the U.S. in 2022 and held an immigration detainer lodged by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - facts which critics say shifted focus from the actual crash mechanics to the driver’s legal status. At the same time, advocacy groups stress that thousands of Sikh truckers, who play a vital role in the U.S. freight industry, are being stigmatized because of high-profile cases involving immigrant drivers. The net effect is that regulation, public-safety rhetoric and immigration enforcement are converging - with Sikh drivers often disproportionately impacted not necessarily because of safety records but because of their visible migrant identity.
When I was conducting interviews for my master’s dissertation, I spoke with seven asylum seekers who had taken the so-called “Donkey route” — an irregular migration pathway through Latin America into the United States. All seven had applied for, or intended to apply for, commercial driving licences (CDLs) upon arrival. For many new migrants, trucking represents an accessible path to economic stability: it requires limited formal education, offers immediate employment prospects, and provides a chance to move between states while sending remittances home. Under U.S. law, however, CDL eligibility is contingent on legal presence, meaning that only citizens, lawful permanent residents, or individuals with specific work-authorization documents (such as asylum applicants with Employment Authorization Documents, or EADs) can obtain these licences. While this allows some asylum seekers to work legally as truck drivers, others in liminal status — awaiting case decisions or lacking valid documentation — find themselves unable to secure a CDL despite completing training programs.
For Punjabi and Sikh migrants, trucking is more than just a job; it is a community-based occupation with transnational roots. Many were trained or had family experience in transport businesses in Punjab or the Gulf states before migrating to North America. Yet, the Trump administration’s heightened verification regime, combined with media narratives that frame migrant drivers as potential risks, has deepened the precarity of this workforce. Singh’s case, therefore, is not an isolated tragedy but part of a larger pattern where immigrant visibility and regulatory tightening intersect, exposing the fragility of migrant livelihoods in America’s essential industries.
There are various strategies that immigrants employ while navigating American racial capitalism, strategies that blur the conventional distinction between “class struggle” and “non-class struggle” actions that working-class individuals adopt to counter their socio-economic marginalization. As Riley and Brenner (2022) argue, this distinction can be understood as one between “individualist and class-collaborationist” approaches, on the one hand, and “collective class-based action” on the other. The former involves workers striving to pursue and protect their own labor power without necessarily perceiving themselves as participants in a broader class struggle. In contrast, the latter—what Riley and Brenner identify as working-class class politics, entails workers linking redistributive demands to an overarching effort to assert political control over the social surplus that they produce and that capital appropriates. Moreover, it requires that they understand themselves as members of a class in a society structured by class divisions.
Within this framework, Punjabi diaspora workers, particularly Sikh truck drivers in the United States, navigate a dual terrain. On one side, they engage in individual strategies to secure licenses, maintain employment, and survive within restrictive immigration and labour systems - actions that fall within what Riley and Brenner call “non-class” or “individualist” struggles. Yet, at the same time, their collective organizing efforts, advocacy through community networks, and resistance to discriminatory state policies reveal elements of class-based politics, as they challenge structural exclusions within the American labor market. Thus, as Punjabi migrant workers negotiate their position as racialized labor within U.S. capitalism, they straddle both categories—transforming survival strategies into subtle yet potent acts of class politics.
The position of Sikh truck drivers must also be understood within the broader logistics economy, where racialised labour sustains the circulation of goods under global capitalism. Scholars such as Deborah Cowen (2014) describe logistics as “the lifeblood of global trade,” a system that ensures the smooth movement of commodities while simultaneously producing new forms of insecurity for workers. In The Deadly Life of Logistics, Cowen demonstrates how the promise of global mobility for goods is made possible by the immobility and surveillance of workers, especially migrants whose bodies and documents are constantly monitored through regulatory regimes (Cowen, 2014). Punjabi truckers in the United States embody this paradox: they enable the continuous flow of America’s supply chains but remain themselves entangled in immigration enforcement, language-testing protocols, and precarious labour contracts.
This contradiction exemplifies what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) calls “organized abandonment”—a process through which racialised communities are simultaneously relied upon and structurally neglected. As Gilmore argues, racial capitalism operates not only through exploitation but through the active production of vulnerability. The trucking industry’s dependence on migrant drivers, particularly from South Asia, reveals this duality: they are essential to the economy yet excluded from the full protections of citizenship and stable employment. Many Sikh drivers work as independent contractors, shouldering the costs of fuel, maintenance, and insurance while being denied collective bargaining rights. Their economic precarity mirrors broader neoliberal patterns that shift risk onto individuals while concealing structural inequities.
At the same time, these workers’ responses demonstrate forms of collective resilience and emergent class consciousness. Across North America, Gurdwaras and Punjabi community centres have become hubs of mutual aid, offering legal guidance, transport safety information, and language assistance. Trucking networks on platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook connect thousands of Sikh drivers, enabling rapid mobilisation during ICE raids or workplace disputes. These grassroots practices blur the line between survival and political resistance, embodying what Riley and Brenner (2022) call the movement from “individualist” to “class-based” strategies. Even when not formally unionised, such communities enact solidarity through everyday acts of cooperation and resistance, from challenging discriminatory inspections to organising around fair pay.
Finally, for many Sikh men, trucking also functions as a space of dignity and self-definition within the racial hierarchies of American capitalism. The truck cabin becomes both workplace and refuge, a mobile home where turbans, religious music, and Punjabi radio connect drivers to transnational identities. Yet, their visibility also renders them vulnerable to racial profiling. In this sense, their struggle is not merely economic but cultural and existential: an assertion of belonging in a system that marks them as perpetually foreign. The story of Jashanpreet Singh, and others like him, thus illuminates how migrant workers navigate and resist the racialised contours of capitalism, transforming endurance itself into a form of political agency.
Transnational Routes and the Donkey Pathway
The migration of Punjabi and Sikh workers into the U.S. trucking industry cannot be understood in isolation from the transnational infrastructures of mobility that shape contemporary migration. Many migrants who eventually find themselves driving eighteen-wheelers across the American Midwest have first traversed what is colloquially known as the Donkey route, a perilous irregular migration pathway that stretches from South Asia through the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America, before culminating at the U.S.–Mexico border. The term itself signifies endurance, struggle, and survival: a passage that mirrors both the aspirations and vulnerabilities of global working-class migrants.
This route has increasingly become an avenue for young Punjabi men seeking economic opportunity amid declining agricultural prospects, mounting debt, and shrinking job markets in rural Punjab . As migration scholars note, irregular routes like this one are symptoms of global inequality, not causes of it (De Genova, 2017). They are products of a world where borders function as instruments of labour discipline, simultaneously excluding and incorporating migrants into racialised economies. Upon arrival, asylum seekers often transition into industries like trucking, agriculture, or logistics, where labour shortages meet minimal state protection. Many of those I interviewed during my master’s dissertation described trucking as both an economic necessity and a symbolic achievement, a way to reclaim dignity after months of invisibility and humiliation during their passage northward.
The Donkey route thus serves as a transnational extension of the racial-capitalist labour circuit. Migrants who survive the route arrive in the United States already enmeshed in systems of debt, dependency, and precarity. Their first aspiration is not ownership or stability, but legality, the right to exist and work. The trucking industry, with its relatively low barriers to entry for those holding Employment Authorization Documents (EADs), becomes an entry point into the American labour market. Yet, the very visibility of Sikh truckers, through their turbans, language, and networks, renders them legible to both the state and the public as racialised others. In moments of crisis, such as the Ontario crash involving Jashanpreet Singh, their symbolic position in the American economy shifts from “essential worker” to “potential threat.”
Conclusion
The experiences of Sikh truck drivers in the United States reveal the intricate ways migration, labour, and racial capitalism intersect. What began as a single tragic incident, the 21 October 2025 crash, exposes deeper fault lines within American society: a system that depends on migrant labour for its logistical survival yet criminalises and racialises the very bodies that sustain it. The Trump administration’s renewed enforcement measures, coupled with media narratives that foreground immigration status over structural causes, illuminate how visibility becomes both a burden and a strategy of survival for racialised workers.
Through the lens of Riley and Brenner’s (2022) distinction between “individualist” and “class-based” strategies, Sikh truckers exemplify how working-class migrants blur these categories, transforming everyday acts of endurance, solidarity, and mobility into quiet forms of class politics. Their resistance does not always manifest in organised strikes or collective bargaining but through acts of persistence: driving long hours, supporting each other across states, and insisting on their right to exist and work with dignity.
Ultimately, the Donkey route and the highway are connected by a single thread, both are roads of risk, traversed by those whose survival fuels global economies. The Punjabi migrant’s journey from border crossings to truck cabins encapsulates the contradictions of our time: global mobility for goods, immobility for workers, essential labour rendered disposable. Yet, within this contradiction lies the seed of political agency. In the hum of engines and the solitude of America’s highways, Sikh truck drivers continue to make visible the hidden infrastructures of racial capitalism, and in doing so, they remind us that endurance itself can be an act of resistance.