On October 31, Sayfullo Saipov, a twenty-nine-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan, committed the deadliest terrorist attack in New York City since 9/11.

Nothing justifies Saipov’s murderous actions that day. Careening down a mile-long bike path in a rented Home Depot truck, he killed eight people and seriously injured many more.

His actions will only legitimize the frenzied Islamophobia many Americans already embrace, justify further military interventions in the Middle East, and likely lead to the abolition of the immigration program — the Diversity Visa Lottery Program — that allowed him to come to the United States.

The federal investigation will try to uncover why Saipov joined the Islamic State, but it will likely ignore his miserable life as a truck driver — the most plausible explanation for his growing dissatisfaction with the United States.

A day after the attack, the New York Times reported:

Mr. Saipov drove a semi-truck for a living, logging tens of thousands of miles back and forth across the country, from Denver to Detroit, from Canton, Mass., to Salt Lake City. He moved his wife and children from state to state, always searching for something — friends in Ohio, a new life in Florida, family in New Jersey, where he started driving for Uber six months ago. Nothing ever stuck.

Saipov arrived in 2010, one of the worst years of the Great Recession. Trained as an accountant, he hoped to get into the hotel business, but, desperate for work, he took a job driving a truck. He tried to start his own trucking companies, but none of them worked out. He “mainly drove for others, companies like Abror Logistics out of Paterson, NJ,” according to the New York Times.

The state police forces that patrol the nation’s highways routinely profile African-American and immigrant drivers. The latter often gets stuck with the worst vehicles, making them even more likely to be pulled over. Most companies refuse to pay their drivers’ tickets, even if they are responsible for the violation.

Iowa seemed to be an especially unlucky place for Saipov. As the Times story reports:

There he was in Iowa, in December 2011, waiting for 35 minutes along Interstate 80 as officers checked his truck and documents, wrote him a ticket and let him go on his way to Salt Lake City. There he was in Iowa again, in April 2014, stopped for more than an hour for having a cracked windshield and for missing a reflective device while driving a load of cars from Denver to Detroit. And there he was repeatedly at the weigh station at the 415-mile marker on Interstate 80 in Nebraska. Mr. Saipov received a ticket there for driving too long without required rest and for carrying a load just slightly more than allowed.

Married with three kids, Saipov was broke and desperate for a change. He started working for Uber, which promised big bucks for new hires.

Once touted as a techno-marvel disrupting the ancient taxi industry, Uber has since proven to be more like an old-fashioned sharecropping operation. Earlier this year, the Silicon Valley giant agreed to pay a $20 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “after it was found that the ride-sharing company made exaggerated claims about how much drivers could earn on its platform, and how affordable its vehicle financing plans were.”

These ads were designed to attract low-paid workers like Saipov.