Going forward, can we agree that every driver of an 18-wheel vehicle should be required to show their birth certificate before they’re allowed to get on the road?
It’s a measure worth considering after the July 1 tragedy in which Pennsylvania State Trooper Michael E. Pahira Jr., 44, was killed as he was inspecting a parked semitruck. Authorities say the incident occurred when Michael Bon, 33, an illegal migrant from Haiti, veered his own 18-wheeler into Pahira and his parked patrol vehicle during the inspection.
Bon has been in the United States illegally since June 2025, after U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denied his bid to obtain Temporary Protected Status. Nonetheless, at some point in time, Massachusetts saw fit to provide him with a CDL. It isn’t clear whether that occurred before or after he lost his temporary residency, but to Pahira and his family, that detail probably isn’t important.
What’s important are a couple of things about the way that states handle driver’s licensing that are inexplicable in 2026. The first and most obvious is the fact that 19 states, along with the District of Columbia, have avenues in place for illegal migrants to obtain driver’s licenses and get on the road. There's a helpful illustration from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) at this link depicting the states on that list. They include the West Coast, much of the northeast, and at least one red state — Utah.
The second problem? Only a handful of states require applicants to take their driver’s knowledge exams — the written part of the testing process — in English. Florida became just the fourth English-only jurisdiction earlier this year. (The others are Alaska, South Carolina and Wyoming.)
Adding insult to injury, most states won’t even disclose how many foreign-language drivers they’re putting on the roadways. Just one — Oregon — discloses some of that information publicly. Not for CDL drivers, mind you, but for regular license applicants, or what the state calls Class C drivers.
The numbers are a doozy. The number of foreign invaders peaked in 2024, when 82,009 of the state’s 223,227 applicants tested in foreign languages. (The options included Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Most of the foreign-language applicants — 75,146 — were in Spanish.)
In other words, during the last year of President Joe Biden’s administration, 36.8% of Oregon’s applicants were probably not what some might deem authentic Americans.
The number dipped slightly in 2025, to 29% of 197,792 applicants. The progress is probably attributable to President Donald Trump, but it still means that around a third of Oregon's drivers were of questionable origin.
You might be wondering if Oregon is an outlier. By all appearances, the answer is probably “no.”
Under open-record laws, I obtained the same data from Minnesota, where you might expect the intemperate climate to deter a greater number of foreign invaders (even if it’s never deterred the “Learing Center” variety). In 2024, 66.4% of Minnesota's 324,321 applicants tested in English. The number of English applicants ticked up during the first 11 months of 2025, representing 74.2% of 266,290 test-takers.
Spanish led the foreign-language category in both years, at 95,650 in 2024 and 58,612 for the first 11 months of 2025.
Related: Latest Deadly Illegal Alien Truck Driver Had a California-Issued License
(By the way, given the official estimate that only 14 million people are in the U.S. illegally — or some 5% of the population — can anyone explain why something between one-quarter to a third of aspiring drivers in 2025 couldn’t speak English? Are native-born Americans completely uninterested in driving compared to newly arrived migrants, or is someone cooking the books?)
There are plenty of things that federal lawmakers could do to remove this invasive horde from America’s roadways. At a bare minimum, they could pull federal highway funding from the states that actively license illegal migrants. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), among others, have unsuccessfully proposed as much since 2020. It stalled most recently in 2025, in Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) House Judiciary Committee.
Why is the congressional Republican majority blocking passage of a law to keep illegal migrants off the roadways? You be the judge. But if lawmakers don’t like that idea, why not take a cue from the proposal that Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) is cosponsoring to require that all new vehicles come equipped with measures to monitor drivers for drunkenness before they’re allowed to get on the road? It could be as simple as adding a few simple lines to that proposal to require that drivers scan some kind of document proving they’re authentic American citizens — say, a birth certificate — each time they start their vehicles.
Heck, you could even make it part of a “master” interlock and throw in a few more tests just to be safe. (Here’s an even better idea: Make everyone read a few lines in twelfth-grade English aloud before they start their vehicles. That wouldn’t even require an internet connection.)
Any of these proposals would keep potentially millions of foreign drivers off of American highways in the years ahead. The bar is low — and Pahira’s death should be the last reminder we need that the cost of inaction is high.
