The trucking industry is America’s arteries, hauling essential goods across the country to make our lives easier.

Yet greed, human trafficking and illegal labor have clogged our nation’s arteries for years, resulting in the theft of wages from traditionally working-class US jobs to the deaths of innocent Americans caught in this systemic failure.

When we discuss illegal immigration, we usually mention industries like agriculture, construction and manual labor in warehouses.

But the supposedly heavily regulated trucking industry has become a hot spot for illegal labor.

America suddenly got a peek at this after the horrific Aug. 12 crash on Florida’s Turnpike that killed three people.

Indian-born tractor-trailer driver Harjinder Singh, 28, is in the country illegally and can’t speak English yet possessed a non-domicile commercial driver’s license from California.

This accident was a pivotal point for President Trump and his administration, which demanded states enforce the English-proficiency requirement for driving commercial trucks that’s existed since 1937.

Another tragedy occurred just Tuesday: Illegal-immigrant truck driver Bekzhan Beishekeev, from Kyrgyzstan, allegedly killed four people in a crash in Jay County, Ind.

The Department of Homeland Security said he entered the country using the Biden administration’s CBP One cellphone app. Team Biden released him via parole, and Pennsylvania gave him his CDL.

“This accident should have never have happened. This is a well known chameleon carrier within freight-industry social-media circles, and [Transportation Secretary] Sean Duffy himself was engaging with social-media posts bringing attention to their actions last year. We are beyond the point of blaming previous administrations now — it is time to shut these networks down for good,” Justin Martin, an 18-year trucking-industry veteran, told The Post.

Most Americans believed, as I did, that the trucking industry had plenty of safeguards and rules to keep the wrong companies from operating and strict enforcement of who should be on the road, alongside consequences for breaching the rules.

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“You can set up a trucking company in a day,” Martin said.

New carrier registrations have skyrocketed, from around 50,000 in 2016 to 158,000 in 2023. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulates the field under the Department of Transportation.

“Starting around 2016, 2018 is really when the floodgates opened. The Obama administration passed a new rule in the FMCSA that got rid of the English-language requirement for truck drivers. They were importing the drivers that they wanted.”

The rule told inspectors to give a warning to drivers not proficient in English rather than take them off the road. Bad actors took advantage of the ease of creating a trucking business, overwhelming enforcement with overnight companies that are difficult to regulate and hiring illegal immigrants at lower labor rates.

Trump’s Office of Management and Budget is moving to address the massive problem.

Its interim final rule “Restoring Integrity to the Issuance of Non-Domiciled CDLs” had a status change last week into “pending review.”

When we discuss human trafficking in the trucking industry, we automatically think about people being smuggled in the trucks and sometimes........

© New York Post