Why Are Sikh Truckers So Prominent in the US?
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 09 Apr, 2025

Trucking, an industry that we’ve long associated with white men, has become a go-to place of employment for Punjabi Sikhs.

After a full day of driving, you pull over to the quintessential American truck stop. What are you grabbing for dinner? They’ve got the classics: a Circle K with beef jerky, Bugles, and Mountain Dew. A string of Arby’s, McDonald’s and a Subway if you want to feel like you’re being healthy. And, of course, as you’ll find at many truck stops, there’s the Punjabi dhaba, where you can get a hearty portion of murgh makhani and chole bhature.

If the last option sounded out of place, you may not be aware of what the modern-day trucking industry looks like and how big a role Indians play in it. Specifically, Punjabi Sikhs. 

Sikhs, who originated from the state of Punjab in Northern India, are often the guys you see with a turban on their heads and steel bangles, called kadas, around their wrists. Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world, even though many don’t realize that it's entirely separate from Islam and Hinduism (the turban worn by Osama Bin Laden, who is very much not a Sikh, contributed to that confusion along with a massive wave of post 9-11 hate crimes against Sikhs). 

Many Sikhs found their way to the US and Canada in the 1980s following a violent insurgency against them that involved the government killing their spiritual leader in Punjab and then, as retaliation, the assassinaton of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984. 

Today, around 150,000 Sikhs are estimated to work in the trucking industry, with many based in California. That’s 20-30% of the entire US Sikh population. And while that puts Sikhs at under 10% of all truck drivers, the numbers are only increasing, particularly in the face of a growing driver shortage of somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 as many are hitting retirement age. Between just 2017 and 2018, 30,000 Sikhs joined the US trucking industry. 

This feels random, right? I mean, Sikhs can’t even wear trucker hats because of their turbans. But if you take a look at Sikh culture, there are actually a lot of reasons why it makes sense. Here are a few:

Freedom

Sikhs have a history of doing their own thing and working non-traditional jobs, often without an immediate supervisor. Driving their own vehicle around all day kind of fits that bill.

While the reasons for independence in the workplace may partly be personality-related, they’re also practical. Some aspects of Sikhism are not conducive to everyday jobs. For one, those who adhere strictly to the religion will go their entire lives without cutting their hair (head, beard, body, and otherwise). That may not fly in some workplaces due not just to ostracization, but, say workplace policies like those in food service industry jobs that attempt to forbid facial hair.

But truck driving, an insulating job that’s often out of the public eye, typically gives them the flexibility to wear whatever they want and adhere to the tenets of their religion without judgement. 

Skillset

Driving does not require a formal education, which makes it ideal for immigrants who fled here in the 1980s with few qualifications that other jobs demanded. While you may not have imagined Indians as truckers, you probably do think of them as drivers. Almost everyone has a stereotype in their mind of South Asians as taxi drivers. 

And speaking of stereotypical Sikh jobs, the classic “7/11 owner” deserves a shoutout. I mentioned Sikhs’ desire to do their own thing and enforce their own workplace rules. That fact, combined with an entrepreneurial spirit, is why many Sikhs end up running small businesses like mini mart franchises (note: Apu, famed owner of the “Kwik-E-Mart” in the Simpsons is a Hindu and not a Sikh. He’s also voiced by a white guy.) 

The desire to own franchises translates to the trucking world, where many Sikh drivers have worked their way up to running trucking businesses and managing fleets of hundreds of vehicles. A Washington Post article suggests that as many as 20% of trucking businesses in the US are run by Punjabis. Sikhs taking on ownership positions will continue to lead to their friends, family, and other members of the community joining the trucking industry as well.

Masculinity

When you imagine a truck driver, you’re probably picturing a burly guy, not unlike the man on a roll of Brawny paper towels. Trucking is, after all, a male-dominated industry, highly associated with tropes that we ascribe to men: unloading heavy equipment, operating machinery, traveling to potentially sketchy areas alone. So it might make sense that Sikhs, a people largely defined by masculine tropes - beards, weapons, a history of combat - are drawn to it.

This is not to say that misogyny is any more inherent in Sikh culture than in most corners of the world. But like many other cultures, Sikh men do often take on the role of primary breadwinner and head of household. 

This is not to say Sikh men are the only ones in the workforce. For example, most news articles describe the Punjabi dhabas I mentioned earlier as family affairs with women helping run the kitchens while sons and daughters working the cash register. As the number of Sikh truck drivers continues to skyrocket, we can expect the number of dhabas to follow, often in the most remote parts of the country like Burns, WY, Sayre, OK, and Bakersfield, CA.

So it might be time to change that image of truckers as middle-aged white guys with big guts wearing flannel shirts and trucker hats. Actually, the gut part still stands. The chicken murgh makhani from those dhabas does eventually take its toll.