Two of the nation’s largest and most powerful business groups are using the president’s call for a doubling of U.S. exports in the next five years to demand that his administration reinstitute a suspended cross-border trucking program with Mexico.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable both said Wednesday that lifting the ban on the program would go a long way towards demonstrating the administration’s commitment to its export goals.

“This is an important benchmark of the administration’s willingness to put some action behind its stated goals of doubling U.S. exports,” Patrick Kilbride, a spokesman at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Due to the North American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to allow Mexican trucks full access to U.S. roadways by 1995. However, opposition led by safety advocates and organized labor managed to keep the borders closed to Mexican trucks, more-or-less. After a Mexican trucking company successfully sued the U.S. for its failure to meet its obligations under the agreement, the Bush administration instituted a pilot program that was later scuttled by Congress.

In response to congress cutting off funds for the program last year, the Mexican government imposed a slew of tariffs on 90 U.S. imports totaling $2.4 billion. Mexican officials now say that they will not drop the tariffs unless their trucks and drivers are given full access to American roadways.

“If we don’t see a concrete proposal from the U.S. in the next few weeks, Mexico will exercise its legal rights, which include expanding the list of products subject to retaliation,” a government official told The Wall Street Journal.

Critics of the program have long cited safety concerns and, more recently, the growing specter of Mexican drug cartels using the program to smuggle illegal drugs into the U.S. as reasons for ending the program.

A report last year by ABC News only intensified those fears. The TV network found that Mexican drug cartels are “using a huge fleet of 18-wheelers to get their product into the United States.”

The drivers of those trucks have little to fear, according to ABC News, because less than 5 percent of the trucks entering the country from Mexico are inspected. A 2005, Government Accounting Office report found that number to be closer to 2 percent. In 2008, it was estimated that over three million 18-wheelers entered the country from Mexico.

But if the president follows the lead of The Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, he could create a major rift within his own party and with allied interest groups in the form of labor unions.
Earlier this year, a coalition of 77 House members, most of whom are Democrats, sent the president a letter demanding that he renegotiate the NAFTA provision that give Mexican trucks full access to American roadways.

“Mexico has no meaningful system for commercial driver’s licenses, drug testing or hours of service,” the letter read. “This is a trade agreement that threatens the safety of the American public. Mexico has no right to use tariffs to force unsafe trucks with exhausted overworked, underpaid drivers into the United States.”

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