Fox, Bush in Sync to Get Truckin’

President Bush’s state visit from Mexican President Vicente Fox has drawn a lot of ink. However, all but lost in the coverage of immigration issues has been Fox’s endorsement of Bush’s position on another important issue: allowing Mexican trucks full access to U.S. highways, one of the biggest inside-the-Beltway fights this year.

Bush has spearheaded this issue, citing the need to honor our North American Free Trade Agreement commitments (or be hit with up to $2 billion in damages) and the benefits of free trade. Opponents have gone to great lengths to stop it (e.g. the House transportation bill prohibited processing any applications for access by Mexican firms), claiming that Mexican trucks are too unsafe to be allowed on our roads.

However, that trump card is trumped up. To see that, one need go no farther than Otay Mesa near San Diego, the major entry point for Mexican trucks into California. Otay Mesa has had a $19-million, state-of-the-art border inspection station for five years. It and a sister station 100 miles to the east in Calexico are the only two of 27 U.S. truck stations with inspectors present during all hours of operation. At Otay Mesa, despite a far more intensive inspection regime, only 23% of Mexican trucks failed inspection, insignificantly higher than the 22% failure rate for California trucks. These figures are slightly better than the national average for U.S. trucks.

For California as a whole (two other entry points in the state are not staffed all the time), the Mexican truck failure rate was 27%. In contrast, the Mexican truck failure rate was almost twice that at one station in Texas, which tries to enforce statewide safety compliance with only 42 inspectors checking a tiny fraction of 8,600 trucks a day.

Otay Mesa and Calexico demonstrate that where there are fully staffed, modern truck stations applying stringent standards, Mexican trucks are no less safe than U.S. trucks. This completely undermines the argument that we must exclude them from our highways to avoid a rolling Armageddon.

Further, the success at these two California stations helps explain the much higher Mexican truck failure rates in other border states. The chances of being inspected in these other states are very slight. It can be far less costly for a Mexican trucking company to use “marginal” trucks and have only a small fraction detained and repaired than to bring its entire fleet up to U.S. standards. Many Mexican truckers play the odds with substandard trucks, leading to a very high failure rate for the few trucks inspected at those stations.

But that high failure rate does not prove that Mexican trucks are unsafe. It just demonstrates that those trucks most likely to be unsafe will enter the U.S. where safety standards are least effectively enforced. An effective inspection program, following the Otay Mesa model, would keep such trucks off U.S. soil, without the need for any other restrictions.

The unsafe Mexican truck “boogeyman” is an intentional distortion by those who want to keep potential competitors on the other side of the border. Since we already know how to solve the problem, those proposals by alleged safety advocates are just protectionism.

The delaying tactics include the House bill’s ban on processing of Mexican truck company applications, the Senate bill’s prohibition on sending more truck inspectors to the Mexican border until enough new ones are trained (combined with a failure to fund 80 of 126 new federal safety inspectors recommended by a federal audit) and more.

When people cry wolf at a problem that they know how to solve and do all they can to keep from implementing the solution, their claims are literally incredible. That is exactly what is being done by opponents of opening our southern border to truck competition.