It’s a tale of two truck drivers, both immigrants to North American countries, that differ greatly in many respects.
Both, however, raise a fundamental question about the nature of immigration and public safety: Namely, why do the cultural chieftains of the West feel obligated to compromise the latter to promote as much of the former as possible — and all in the name of national self-loathing?
Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, for one, is an Indian immigrant to Canada who was convicted in a truck crash that killed 16 players and staff from a youth hockey team in 2018. He got there legally.
Harjinder Singh, meanwhile, is an illegal immigrant to the United States who is charged in a crash that killed three people in Florida. Despite the fact that he wasn’t here legally, he was able to obtain a commercial driver’s license in the People’s Republic of California. He faces three counts of vehicular homicide after he made what authorities say was a profoundly dangerous U-turn on the Florida Turnpike using an “Official Use Only” median crossing.
“The truck’s trailer blocked all lanes of oncoming traffic as it nosed over the median — with footage from inside its cab showing a black minivan driving toward it with no time to stop and nowhere to turn to avoid a collision,” the New York Post reported.
That case has become the subject of a national debate over the effects of illegal immigration and the harm that can be wreaked by states like California that simply don’t care about the danger that, say, a driver whose knowledge of American road laws or even of the English language might pose.
You may not remember it, but the tragedy Sidhu caused was an international story, as well. As the U.K.’s Daily Mail noted in a Wednesday report, he “barreled through a stop sign at 53 to 60 mph” on April 6, 2018, hitting a bus carrying the players and staff of the Humboldt Broncos in a rural area of the province of Saskatchewan.
Sidhu, then 29, pleaded guilty to numerous charges of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing bodily injury. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Should Sidhu be deported as quickly as possible?
He spent just four years behind bars, however, and was released on parole. Then, he went back to live with his Canadian wife, with whom he fathered a child who has health complications.
Now, he’s fighting deportation to India on humanitarian grounds, arguing that his child’s heart and lung conditions, as well as his Canadian wife, should be grounds to reinstate his permanent residency in Canada.
That residency was revoked last year, and the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada ordered him deported.
Now, it’s worth noting that this doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t get deported. As Canada’s Global News noted, he’s tried this gambit before the Canada Border Services Agency turned him over to the country’s Immigration and Refugee Board to decide whether he was deportable.
Global News reported that Sidhu’s argument hinged upon the theory that the CBSA relied too heavily on public opinion against him and “refused to consider the hardships he might face in India because of his PTSD and depression.”
Ottawa-based Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton ruled against Sidhu in December 2023 and handed his case to the IRB, who found that he should be deported.
Now, he’s making his case based on the child he fathered with the mother — both of whom are Canadian citizens — would be humanitarian injustice.
Migrant truck driver Jaskirat Singh Sidhu who killed 16 in crash tries to stop deportation https://t.co/k3uutvUhwX via @DailyMail
— Tom Quiggin (@TomTSEC) August 20, 2025
“Now it’s against the horrific nature of the consequences of his mistake. He pretty much has everything else going for him in terms of humanitarian grounds,” said Sidhu’s lawyer, Michael Greene, per the Daily Mail.
“In this case, it really makes a difference. It would be very difficult for that child to live in India with his health conditions. So the best interests of the child is a big issue for him.”
A bigger issue is the fact that he killed 16 people, served only half of his sentence, and still believes he deserves to stay in the country on humanitarian grounds. And this sets up what could be a two-year battle in court.
The child can stay in Canada, of course. Canada is under no obligation to ensure his father does, and it has very considerable reason to deport him. But it also had very considerable reason not to bring him there in the first place.
Despite the fact that the country has been in long-term economic stagnation even before the trade war with Donald Trump’s administration, Canada wanted to bring in as many immigrants possible — partially to juice economic growth, partially to lower the wages of certain jobs that it’s perceived that native-born people shouldn’t have to degrade themselves by taking on.
From a BBC article in 2022 titled “Canada: Why the country wants to bring in 1.5m immigrants by 2025”:
For many years, Canada has tried to attract permanent residents – landed immigrants who have the right to stay in the country indefinitely but who are not citizens — to keep the population and the economy growing. Last year, the country took in 405,000 permanent residents — the most in its entire history.
The reasons are in, some ways, about simple math. Like many western nations, Canada has an aging population with a lower birth rate. What that means is that if the country wants to grow, instead of shrink, it will have to bring in immigrants.
Of course, we go about things differently in America. We just let the floodgates on the southern border stay open when there’s a Democratic administration then make it as difficult as possible to deport them when the Republicans are in power.
What the elites have decided is that there are certain jobs that their citizens won’t do — or, at least, their type of citizen won’t do. Felicitously, there are also citizens of other countries they feel bad for, because the West has succeeded in ways they haven’t, and that’s obviously due to oppression. Thus are two birds slain with one stone.
If the slayings are messy — well, hey, nobody said that decolonizing the West was going to be easy, right? Or at least nobody in academia ever said that, and that’s all that really matters. Just as long as it’s easy for the elites, it’s all good.
And we’ve gotten to the point where the people who support this piffle don’t even try to hide it. Here’s Texas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, for instance, telling a black church congregation earlier this year that “we done picking cotton” — as a clear reference to slavery as you can get — so we need illegal immigrants to do it for us:
NEW: Rep. Jasmine Crockett suggests the United States needs illegal immigrants because “we done picking cotton.”
Crockett made the argument that the U.S. needs immigrants for farming while speaking at Grace Baptist Church in Connecticut.
“So I had to go around the country and… pic.twitter.com/DUEZ4PskEg
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 7, 2025
This, too, applies to the case of Harjinder Singh. Now, the liberal outrage seems aimed at the fact that the administration has dared to “crackdown” on illegal immigrants or those legally here but who can’t speak the language yet continue to drive commercial vehicles.
From USA Today: “No English, no commercial driving. Crackdown on truckers speeds up.” That’s a crackdown? As headlines go, that reads right up there with “No steering wheel, no NHTSA approval. Crackdown on unsafe cars speeds up.”
This, USA Today noted, led to “[a]t least 3,000 truckers [being] taken off American roads over the past two months,” yet “some critics worry about the potential for improper racial profiling by police.”
Are those critics worried about the potential danger for people who have to share the road with these truckers? Because, as the article noted, “industry experts say they have no data on how many crashes may be caused annually by truckers who can’t read English-language road signs.” Oh.
But speaking English isn’t necessarily the only concern here. Elites in prosperous Western countries always — almost without fail, no matter what language they speak — feel the need to sacrifice their own safety upon the pyre of self-hatred. To atone for those from countries that are “oppressed” (read: less prosperous), we must let them in. It’s the humanitarian thing to do. It helps if they pick cotton at slave wages, because “we done” doing that.
In Canada, a national pariah now believes he’s entitled to stay in the country after he caused 16 deaths through his negligence. He likely won’t get it, simply because of that national pariah status. And yet, the elites of Canada will likely prove they’ve learned nothing from this experience and what creates that sense of entitlement.
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