“Teenagers eager to make quick cash” are becoming “load drivers” at the porous US southern border, picking up illegal aliens freshly smuggled into the country. This pathetic scenario highlights a key facet of the festering crisis that goes unspoken: how widespread disrespect for this nation’s immigration laws in politics, business, media, and even policing itself breeds a greater lack of respect for the rule of law in general in America today.

Recipe for Disaster

The Sierra Vista Herald Review is the local newspaper for Sierra Vista, AZ, located about 20 miles from the Mexican border. The paper ran a surreal article March 1 detailing the spirit of complete lawlessness on the area’s roads. Individuals known as “load drivers” are “getting paid about $1,000 for every undocumented person they can stuff into their vehicles, investigators say,” The Herald Review reports. It detailed the pure mayhem:

“The issue, aside from the fact the migrants have crossed the border illegally, is that load car drivers — usually from Phoenix, other parts of Arizona, or other states — are unfamiliar with the area and they’re instructed by their recruiters to drive as fast as humanly possible in order to avoid capture, Sheriff Mark Dannels and County Attorney Brian McIntyre said.

“More often than not, police say, the drivers are teenagers eager to make quick cash at the risk of the community’s safety.”

Out-of-town teenagers trying to make a quick buck recklessly speeding? What could possibly go wrong?

The Herald Review featured a sidebar to this tale of woe that would be comical if the situation wasn’t so dire. Captioned “Safety tips for motorists,” it emphasized just how routine a problem illegal immigration has become in the US southwest.

Drivers are urged to “be aware of their surroundings” and to “pull over immediately” if they see a police car behind them because it is likely to be pursuing a load driver.

“Additionally, motorists are advised to wait a few seconds when a light turns green at an intersection and look both ways,” the tragic tutorial continued. “Load car drivers usually do not adhere to traffic signals and have crashed into unaware motorists.”

How did the American people ever come to accept this as a normal way of living?

Blood on Their Hands

There’s no mystery. A couple of decades featuring leading politicians, clergy members, business groups, prominent CEOs, and a thoroughly corrupted big-box media apparatus singing an endless chorus on behalf of illegal aliens have cultivated a distinct lack of regard for this nation’s immigration laws.

The rot has even reached local policing ranks. Some 130 active-duty police chiefs from around the country are part of the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force, an organization that advocates for illegal aliens despite its members’ sworn duty to protect and serve the citizens of the communities that employ them.

Having been exposed for all their young lives to saccharine hectoring from credentialed personages on the critical need to show “compassion” for the “undocumented,” why on Earth would cash-hungry teens pause for a moment to consider the morality of helping smugglers transport these “poor souls” away from the border and into the heartland of America?

The lethal issue of load drivers has been a phenomenon for years. That it is being exacerbated today due to the Biden administration’s deliberate unwillingness to secure the border should not be the least bit surprising to anybody.

In 2009, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported:

“A sport utility vehicle tumbled into an Imperial County irrigation canal one night last year, loaded beyond capacity with at least 20 people just smuggled into the country.

“Six were killed. Authorities say the driver was a teenage boy who will go on trial this week in a case that has brought attention to the dangerous practice of human-smuggling rings hiring teens to work as foot guides and load drivers.”

Thirteen years later, and teen load drivers have disrupted an entire town in Arizona.

“The problem we’re having is that these folks are being told by the people who are recruiting them that the faster you go the more likely it is that you’ll get away,” county attorney McIntyre told The Herald Review. “When the reality is that the faster you go the more likely it is that you’re going to kill somebody, including yourself.”

But, hey, why take your foot off the pedal when powerful cultural forces are ceaselessly babbling niceties about those who knowingly and flagrantly flout US law?

If “no human being is illegal,” then what’s so bad about stuffing 20 or so in the backseat of a Toyota Camry at $1,000 a head?

“Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. The only way you can save money nowadays,” as Harry Lime put it on the Ferris Wheel in The Third Man.

~ Read more from Joe Schaeffer.