While the need to understand English with a CDL isn’t a new mandate, its enforcement has become a significant challenge, says Tom Bortnyk, senior vice president and general counsel of masLabor, the largest H-2A visa processor in the country.
While some of this increased scrutiny came on the heels of a fatal crash on the Florida Turnpike in August 2025, Bortnyk says what has happened is a much stricter enforcement around English proficiency.
“That’s not a new requirement, and it just simply wasn’t enforced rigorously,” he says. “So, the focus was kind of on CDLs and the English language requirement.”
Bortnyk says that what MasLabor has seen on the consulate level with visas is that this focus has broadened and impacts all drivers.
“There’s plenty of drivers, especially in the H-2A program, that are exempt from CDL requirements because it’s farm driving, and so, even though they qualify for an agricultural exemption, we are still seeing high levels of scrutiny for such drivers,” he says.
From the Field to the Interstate
Richard Keeth, chief operating officer with masLabor, says inconsistent enforcement is also an issue. He says there are many different drivers that operate farm-use vehicles, whether it’s a pickup with water for crews in the fields or to transport the workers on empty farmland or even just run crews to the store or to wire money home.
There are also workers who often run produce from storage to a long-term holding facility that’s under 150 miles away. He says those drivers are all being compared to semitruck drivers on the interstate.
“We’re seeing interviews and scrutiny on folks who’ve been driving farm-use vehicles in this country for eight years,” Keeth says.
Another thing that’s caused some confusion and extra attention is what constitutes English competency.
“Proficiency in this context, the DOT context, obviously largely pertains to interactions with law enforcement,” Keeth says. “If you’re stopped, you need to be able to communicate, respond to a lawful order, and then also you need to be able to understand common street signs, roadways, you know, things that maybe are very second nature.”
But Keeth says that instead of verbal proficiency, H-2A workers who will drive have to take a written English assessment on what road signs mean; that can be difficult, as some workers have poor written skills and sometimes are illiterate, which also makes administering a written test challenging.
Keeth says one client has a few workers who have been driving loads of potatoes in the U.S. for about 10 to 15 years. They have safe driving histories, and while they may not be able to articulate in English the extent of a traffic law, they’re competent and law abiding.
“You can’t suddenly say everybody coming from Mexico suddenly needs to be proficient in English,” he says. “We hear English proficiency a lot. That’s a very high threshold.”
Subjective Scores at the Border
Keeth says it’s often left up to each consulate worker to determine what proficient English is, as there are no rules or guidelines for these administrators to follow.
“What you have is complete variability between consulates and between consular officials,” he says. “So, for example, we have clients who get, say, 100% of them rejected in Tijuana; same process, same group can go through Monterrey and be fine.”
Keeth says he’s interfaced with workers who have been rejected and others who have been approved, often with the same competency going to the consulate on the same day with the same driving history. Depending on the official administering the test, one worker is approved, and the other is rejected.
Bortnyk says this lack of standardization makes it difficult for the worker, the grower who depends on these workers and anyone applying to the H-2A program, as the results can be somewhat unpredictable.
“It’s just the lack of standardization and the amount of subjectivity that goes into it,” he says. “Everybody kind of has their own definition of what level of English is acceptable. And the problem is that the decision is now being handled by consular officials, you know, people that are working in the U.S. State Department, whereas traditionally, that’s the sort of function that would be left to a DOT person who specializes in what it takes to be English proficient in the context of truck driving.”
He says MasLabor has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to try to obtain copies of a guideline if one exists.
Fumbling at the 1-Yard Line
Keeth recalls one worker who had to provide a motor vehicle record to demonstrate a clean driving record, but his Mexican CDL was transferable in the state where he worked because of a memorandum of understanding. Therefore, the state he drove in didn’t have a record of him. Because he couldn’t provide a U.S. record, that worker was held up in administrative processing.
“We have employers saying, ‘What can we do?’” Keeth says. “It’s fumbling at the 1-yard line. It cuts your legs out from under you. When you actually get your harvest in, you get your field workers in, you need somebody to move the product to market. ... That’s not something to be understated.”
Keeth says growers invest a lot of money in insurance to hire these drivers, only to potentially not have them when they are needed.
“Three months just to figure out a small discrepancy with a motor vehicle record is a lot for a small grower who is counting on those two drivers to drive at a very critical point in their season,” he says.
Bortnyk says the other takeaway is that no matter what a grower does, what an H-2A administrator does, the application could be seamless and there could still be holdups.
“We can do everything 100% right,” he says. “This is a multimonth process. It involves a lot of different government agencies. We could navigate that government filing process seamlessly. Every single thing could be on time. Every single thing could be perfect. But if we get to the consulate and the worker gets held in an administrative hold over English proficiency, even if that worker is a bench-approved, the workers are late, which means crops are rotting in the field, things not getting delivered; it has an impact, even if we did everything possible to ensure timeliness.”
State-Level Conflicts for Native Speakers
Another hiccup, Bortnyk says, is that many native English-speaking guest workers from South Africa or Jamaica face even bigger hiccups.
“They have to get their CDL when they come to the U.S. So, they get here, and then they go through the same process that a U.S. driver would go through to get a U.S. CDL,” he says. “There are many states now that are not even allowing them to get that license.”
While the Trump administration carved out exceptions for the H-2A and H-2B programs, Bortnyk says the federal government is hands-off when it comes to states and motor vehicle licenses.
“That’s added a whole new level of strain to it, because here you have drivers that do speak English, and they’re just not even allowed to do so purely by virtue of them being on a foreign visa,” he says of them obtaining CDLs.
