The Indicator from Planet Money - Trump and truckers, Poland prospers, and a booming ant biz

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

It’s Indicators of the Week (now on YouTube!). It’s our weekly look at some of the most fascinating economic numbers from the news. On today’s episode: The Trump administration cracks down on immigrant truck drivers, Poland becomes a top-twenty economy, and the booming business of … ant smuggling? Related episodes: A trucker, a farmer, and an entrepreneur walk into a global supply shock You Could Always Go To Poland The little pet fish that saved a town in the Amazon For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Julia Ritchey and Vito Emanuel. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Daryne Woods. I'm Waylon Wong, and we are joined today all the way from Planet Money by one Miss Mary Child. Hello. Hi, you guys. Thank you so much for having me. It is always so exciting to have you, especially because today is indicators of the week.

We are here to tell you about the most interesting numbers in the news this week. On today's episode, we have new regulators. for immigrant truck drivers. We have a Polish economic renaissance. And ants. A whole lot of ants. That's all after the break. All right, indicators of the week.

Let's start with you. Waylon. My indicator is 200,000. That is the number of foreign-born truck drivers that could be losing their jobs under new regulations from the Trump administration. These new rules went into effect this week. And they affect people who are here legally on temporary visas.

like refugees and asylum applicants. They also apply to Dreamers who are here under DACA. And for the most part, they will not be able to get commercial driver's licenses. And just to put that 200,000 number in perspective, the government says that that affects around 5% of active commercial driver's license holders as of 2024. So the U.S. could be losing 5% of truck drivers with this one policy change. So do you think we'll all know. notice the impacts right away?

It'll probably be more gradual. Under this new policy, the government will no longer allow certain immigrants to get new commercial drivers licenses or renew existing ones. The administration says it expects these 200,000 affected drivers to be forced out of the workforce over the next five years as the licenses come up for renewal. And certainly there will be very few new immigrant truck drivers entering the workforce, right? That's right. And that's in the context of the American Truckers Association.

citing a shortage of truckers right now. So what is the rationale for this policy? The Trump administration has framed this as a safety issue. It says there were 17 fatal crashes last year involving truck drivers that would not have the commercial driver's license under the new rule. All right. So 17 fatal crashes involving this group of truck drivers. Is that a worse track record than truck drivers overall?

Well, that's the thing is according to a lawsuit filed by a group of drivers and labor unions, the government has not provided any data showing that these truck drivers are involved in more accidents than other truck drivers. Whelan, thank you. That was pretty educational. Darian, what do you got? So my indicator is 20, as in Poland is now the 20th largest economy in the world. And in terms of its income per person, it's catching up with rich countries too. Wow. So, I mean, in the 1990s, Poland was not considered wealthy because, I mean, it had just come out from behind the Iron Curtain, right? Yeah, I learned about this milestone from the Associated Press.

Its article this week put it well. A generation ago, Poland rationed sugar and flour, while its citizens were paid one-tenth of what West Germans earned. Today, the economy of the country has edged past Switzerland. They've got swimming pools of sugar now. Yes. And Poland has grown and grown since the fall of the Soviet Union. After 1992, the only time its economy shrunk year on year,

was during the pandemic. So like 35 years without a recession or with only one recession, what's their secret? So there's a few things that people cite and the first being institutions, so independent courts, active bank regulation and an antitrust agency, really putting in place the elements to keep the country predictable for businesses and encouraging competition. And avoid oligarchs, presumably? Yes, minimizing the likelihood that a small band of people hijacks the country's resources like you saw in a lot of other post-Soviet countries. And the other big factor was the European Union. According to an economist cited in the article, there was this huge drive among a lot of

polls that they wanted to join the EU. So they adopted similar practices and laws that allowed them the aid from the EU and also access to this huge market in 2004. A lot of German companies outsourced some production of like car parts and machinery to Holland and the country became integrated into European supply chains. What about the labor market? Is there anything particular there that was a factor? They are quite a highly educated workforce. Half of young people now have degrees. Okay, so we've got this checklist. Institutions that encourage business, consistent laws,

competition, strong education, being in Europe. So is that the recipe for economic success? Yeah, so the playbook is maybe not the most exciting or counterintuitive. but Poland is a good case study to show that the economic basics can work incredibly well. Amazing. Okay, a lesson for us all. I've bought my tickets to Europe. Yeah, exactly. Okay, y'all, my indicator of the week is a very exact number and I'm excited to introduce it to you. It is 2,238.

That is how many ants two guys were reportedly trying to smuggle from Kenya on a plain bound for China. In their pants? No, not in pants. Well, that's good. Those are not okay for coming through customs, right? You cannot take ants across international lines. No, you're really not supposed to smuggle wildlife. And in fact, the two guys who have been charged with this, their defense, they're pleading not guilty and they're saying that, in fact, they didn't realize that. Oops. Did they not realize the ants were on their person? No, they did know. A lot of the ants were in tiny, tiny tubes. Tiny tubes.

Yeah, ant-sized tubes. Yeah, little pills, basically. So what were they doing with the ants? So I learned over the course of reading about this that ants are a huge industry now. It is a big adult hobby spurred by apparently social media. And authorities in Kenya have been warning about this increasing demand for garden ants. Apparently European and Asian collectors like to keep them as pets. Are they not ants in China?

Aren't there ants everywhere, but not like the right kind of cool ants? You know what I mean? Like different kinds of ants are cooler than others. These are more fun ants than the ones that are local. Oh, I don't know. Ants can be really big. There actually is a great deal of variety among ants. They can be different colors and sizes and they have different special features.

But don't ask me too many questions about ants because I don't know. But I wanted to let you guys know. This is in fact the second live ant related charge for one of the guys. eyes. And I know. A repeat offender? I know. He's really at it with the ants.

And last May, a court in Kenya found four other people guilty of attempting to smuggle thousands of live queens, also bound for collectors in Europe and Asia. Wow. It's so interesting. There truly is an illicit microeconomy for everything. And so is this more of a problem for Kenya losing rare ants or for China accepting potentially invasive ants? Like, where's the issue here?

You've really, you've hit the nail on the head here, Darian. It's, it's both. It's a risk for Kenya because if you take too many of the ants away, then they don't have enough in their ecosystem to, like, disperse the little seeds all about. And if you put the invasive species in a different climate where they can thrive, and a recent study actually found that some 25% of these ants that were sold in China over a six-month period were, in fact, like, totally able to thrive where they were dropped off. An invasive species in a new location can bring extra. ecological and economic harm. Now, what is the going rate for an ant? So the guy from China reportedly bought the ants in Kenya for $77 U.S. dollars per 100 ants.

Is that a deal? Sounds really high to me. We have ants here I could give you. So like, but apparently they're not a funny. That's this is kind of expensive. That's pretty percy. I would pay to get rid of my aunts, but I would not buy it a dollar an ant. And when this guy was arrested, I want to let you know.

his luggage was full of test tubes, was full of ants in test tubes, or wrapped in tissue paper rolls, per the BBC reporting. Tissue paper rolls. He must have been collecting them, like, for a long time to get that many tissue paper rolls. But, like, were they closed on the end? And if so, with what? Cellophane, because if you use tape, the ants would get stuck to the tape. I just am so upset thinking about the logistics of this. And it must be.

Carry on, right? This episode can now be found on YouTube. Go to YouTube.com slash planet money. It was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Jimmy Kearley. It was fact-acted by Video Emanuel and Julia Ritchie. Kate and Canon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.