By A.W. Morgan
07/19/2022
At least some Democrats don’t seem to be members of the Treason Lobby, or at least full-fledged members. Maine’s attorney general, Democrat Aaron Frey, is defending a new state law that prohibits logging companies from hiring foreign truckers, and forbids foreign truckers from transporting the logging companies’ products. The law strikes at using temporary agricultural workers with H-2A visas, which VDARE has covered extensively.
Here are the relevant sections of An Act Regarding the Transportation of Products in the Forest Products Industry, which became law in June last year without the governor’s signature:
Prohibition; landowner. A landowner may not hire, or contract with a person to hire, a motor carrier to transport forest products that are harvested from the landowner‘s land from a location in the State to another location in the State unless the motor carrier is operated by a resident of the United States. …
Prohibition; motor carrier. A motor carrier may not transport forest products that are harvested from a landowner‘s land from a location in the State to another location in the State unless the motor carrier is operated by a resident of the United States.
Loggers face a hefty $25,000 fine for a third violation of the law.
The logging industry sued to stop enforcement, and U.S District Judge John Woodcock enjoined the measure in February. A state law cannot supersede a federal law, he ruled [Federal judge blocks Maine law aimed at Canadian log truck drivers, by Kevin Miller, Maine Public, February 22, 2022].
To his credit, Frey has appealed the ruling to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the First Circuit [Maine Urges 1st Circ. To Restore Law Punishing H-2A Hiring, by Alissa Aquino, Law360, July 14, 2022].
“States rarely, if ever, take such steps,” David North of the Center for Immigration Studies observed of the law:
The foreign truck drivers are Canadians covered by the H-2A program for unskilled ag workers. Anyone who has seen a driver of an 18-wheeler back into a tight parking space might argue with the “unskilled” label.
It is, of course, refreshing to see a Democratic state government move against the use of foreign workers. It would be nice to see the Teamsters taking a position on this matter, but that has not yet happened, or happened yet.
[Maine Moves to Limit Use of H-2A Workers in Its Logging Industry, July 19, 2022]
An assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Labor in the 1960s, North also offered an interesting take on the use of H-2A workers in the state’s potato industry. And he compares the use of H-2A workers in Maine to the use of those workers in Texas.
As the Great Replacement goes, Canadian truckers are the least of our worries. After all, Traitor Joe Biden will hand out 300,000 temporary work visas to Mexicans and Central Americans. Still, not a single foreign worker should be hired as long as one American is available.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.