As a student struggling to pay for college, I worked in a steel mill. Two close friends apprenticed as drywall installers. Another joined the street maintenance crew of our home town.
And while I have lived in Arizona for decades, raised a family here and witnessed resourceful young people performing all types of temporary employment, reading that some college and high school students here have come to see human smuggling as a part-time job is a grotesque and unnerving phenomenon I did not see coming.
The story of student athletes at Glendale’s Arizona Christian University doing just that, justifying human smuggling “as kind of like Uber,” is at the heart of a report by The Arizona Republic’s Jason Wolf.
And young smugglers are doing so for the most un-Christian motive of all — money. Or what was described as $1,000 per head.
ACU students were caught but not prosecuted
The U.S. Border Patrol’s John R. Modlin, the chief patrol agent for Tucson Sector, said that high school- and college-age drivers account for 20% of human-smuggling stops in Arizona.