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The SkyePod - SkyeDive: Mass Deportation
00:26:48
Skye talks about mass deportation—the history of deportation in America, the present border situation, and how this could play out in the future. What concerns are inflated—and what problems are we ignoring? Get the full episode by signing...
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Sky Jutani
We were standing right by the wall. He said, people can get over that wall in five minutes. It's not. It's not the barrier people think it is. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Sky Pod, brought to you by Holy Post Media. I am Sky Jutani. I'm grateful that you've joined me for today. Couple updates. Interesting things going on here. Right now as I speak in my office at the Holy Post headquarters, right below me, the studio that we've been wanting to build out forever is finally beginning to be built out. There are cameras and lights. We have some folks on there helping us put all that together are actually being installed. So throughout the day, I've been kind of going downstairs and poking in and see what's going on. I can't wait to show that to everybody and to actually use it. Phil is going to be building out the set design, which hasn't happened yet. There's kind of been a chicken and egg thing going on where he wants to see the lighting all up so you can see what's going to work on the set design. And the lighting people are saying, when is the set design going to be done? Because we need to know what the set's going to look like in order to light it properly. So they've been back and forth and all that. I kind of keep my nose out of it because I know nothing about those things. But I do know that when it's done, it's going to be really cool to actually be in person again on set recording Holy Post episodes. Esau's show is going to be recording stuff in there. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to be doing my interviews down there or not, but it's going to be really cool. The other thing that's neat about this space that we've moved into here, into downtown Wheaton, is we are located on this alleyway in, like, the busiest part of town. And there's kind of the main drag on Hale street, where there's a bunch of restaurants. It's a great place to hang out. And then there's this alleyway that cuts through it to go to the main parking garage in downtown Wheaton. And our office is located off of that alleyway. And there are two windows from the alleyway that look into our new studio space. So when it's all set up and done, you'll be able to, like, walk by and see what we're doing in the studio. Kind of like. Like the studios at Times Square, where you can go and see him or There's a ABC News studio in downtown Chicago on State street that's all glass. This is not like all glass with a glass wall. It's just two windows. But you'll be able to peer in and kind of see the Holy Post studio set and what's going on in there. Maybe when we're recording if the windows are uncovered, but at night and other times you'll be able to see. It's going to look really cool. I'm super excited about that. We also have, while it is the holiday season next week we have our Holy Post Media Christmas party is coming up. Everyone will be in town for that with spouses and significant others. I'm sure it will be festive frivolity with everybody. So I'm looking forward to that. We also. Well, one last thing. This week in the office we got, we get a lot of deliveries here, but we got a special delivery because we received our silver plaque from YouTube commemorating the fact that we've crossed over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is super cool. Thank you for everybody who is following us there. We actually made a big push in the last part of the year to do a lot of new videos and explainer videos. So hopefully you've seen a lot of those. And I think that brought a lot more people into the Holy Post orbit. And I was excited when I saw this because you see other youtubers have those plaques up behind them. I don't know where we're going to put this one, but it's kind of exciting to get that. And I assumed there were other plaques that you get when you hit other markers. And I was disappointed to find out that after 100,000 they don't give you another plaque until you cross a million. That's. I think that one is gold colored. I think it's gonna be a long time before we cross a million, but I guess it's good to have a goal. But anyway, thank you all for your support of what we're doing at Holy Post Media by being Holy Post plus subscribers, by sharing Holy Post content on your social media accounts and with your friends, family, whoever you think needs to hear it. That's how word spreads about what we're doing and then allows us to do more of it and create more of it. So your part in all of this is huge. Thank for that. Especially as we get to the end of the year and we're looking at all the things that happened this year. It makes me more grateful than ever for all of you. Okay, today we are doing a Skydive episode. That is an episode where I do a deep dive on a topic that I've been thinking about. It's just me monologuing, so hopefully we can keep this interesting. And I want to let you know what's been on my mind lately. In the last couple days, I have been a part of two meetings that were gatherings of either academics, writers, Christian leaders. There are different ones. One was at Notre Dame, which was really cool. I actually, believe it or not, had never been to that campus, so it was kind of fun to be there. And the other one was just a zoom call. But both of these meetings were about how Christians, especially, are going to be responding to a second Trump administration. How should pro neighbor Christians think about what's coming down the pike at us? And of course, one of the biggest issues that was brought up in both of these meetings was Trump's plan to deport undocumented immigrants. And it's the Christmas season. I don't know. It always comes to my mind, the thought of immigrants in the season, partly because of the Christmas story and Herod attacking Jesus and his family and them fleeing as refugees to Egypt. And sometimes those connections are made explicit in the sermons we hear and the stories we tell at this time. But the idea of people moving against their will, sometimes with the will. But all that is on my mind at this Christmas season. And then I hear all these meetings about what might be coming at us with Trump's plans. And in both of these meetings, there was alarm, there was concerns expressed, and I'm picking that up even other places I go. We did a Holy Post evening gathering in Long Beach a couple weeks ago, and some of the questions that came up there were, what are we going to do if this mass deportation plan happens? So I want to talk about that, and I want to acknowledge that there are reasons to be concerned, certainly. But some of the rhetoric that I've been bumping into at these meetings from people, I'm listening to things online. Some of the rhetoric isn't entirely rooted in reality. And so I don't want to say we shouldn't be concerned. I think there are reasons to be concerned. But let's be concerned about real things, not imaginary things. One of the things you probably heard me do over the years is criticize, especially the religious right and some of the more hysterical voices over there who inflate fears that aren't rooted in reality in order to motivate people to vote or give money or mobilize in their causes. One that comes to mind is all the hysteria that's been going on for years about Christians losing their religious liberty, we've had David French on to talk about that and others like, there's zero evidence to show that religious liberty is actually under threat in the United States. If anything, it's gotten stronger over the last 20 years and more protected in our law and courts. And so when people use that to drum up fears and freak Christians out, I'm just like, oh, please, you know, how ridiculous. So that happens on the right a lot. And it's interesting now that Trump's been reelected, you're seeing some of that same methodology being employed by the left. And especially on this issue of immigration and deportation, there's a lot of fear mongering going on. And I don't want to say it's not all justified because I think there are things to be very concerned about. I just want to use this time to talk about what should we be concerned about and what should we not be concerned about? One of the things that gets bumped around a lot in this, well, the last 12, eight years, at least maybe 12, is how unprecedented the Trump years have been and the things he has done, the norms that he has broken, the language he has used. And certainly there are a lot of unprecedented things about him and about the politics he's brought to this country. But interestingly, this idea of being anti immigrant and mass deportations is actually not one of them. There is precedence in American history that can inform us about what's going on right now and what might be unfolding in a second Trump term. So this situation that we're in right now, not only is it not unprecedented, I think it was very predictable. And I think some of the things that we're likely to see in the next couple years are also predictable. So here's how I want to tackle this. I want to look at this issue of immigration and, well, anti immigrant feelings and this call for mass deportation. In three parts, we're going to look at past, present, and future. So the past, what can we learn from prior eras in American history that reverberate or echo what we're seeing right now? Second is the present, like our current situation. What are the dynamics going on that got us to this place right now in 2024 and 2025? What is Trump saying? What is he likely to be able to do and not do based on law and politics and reality? And then finally, the future, what's likely to occur in the coming months or weeks? And what does that mean for our response as pro Neighbor Christians. And so that's how I'm going to tackle this. Now, some of you, to begin with the past stuff, some of you might remember that about a year ago I created an explainer video. I think it's called Immigration and race and it's 18 minutes long. It's on our YouTube channel and it covers some of the stuff I'm going to cover in this first part on the past or American history. But if you haven't seen that video, I really encourage you to watch it. The reason I did that video was because I had gone to the southern border and seen some of these dynamics up front. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. But more importantly, I had been on this quest for a couple of years of just being curious about the immigration story of my own family. My father is an immigrant from India, came here in 1970. My mother is white, Chicago native, although, and her side of the family also came to the US not super long ago. But she's mostly Scandinavian, English and Northern European. But I was curious about their stories and where my family came from and how we got here, which took me on this rabbit trail to understand how the law changed so that it allowed my dad to come here when he did. And that is what became the genesis for that video. But some of the history I learned in the process was fascinating because what I realized is that what we're seeing today looks an awful lot like what happened in the 1920s 100 years ago. So let me unpack some of that. Between 1880 and 1920, 23 million immigrants came into the United States. It's referred to as the Great Wave. And for those of you who aren't history buffs and don't know the quite order of things of and how they occurred in American history, this was the era of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis island, you know, the romanticized stories we now tell about down and out immigrants coming over from Europe entering New York Harbor. It's the Godfather Part two story. It's an American tale with feivel and you know, that whole thing. But this great wave of immigrants that came in between 1880 and 1920, that's when my mom's side of the family came here. They were largely Eastern European, Southern European immigrants. There was a lot of others. But that's where if your family background is Polish, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Russian, Jewish, Slavic in any way, your family probably came into this country in that era of the great wave. Irish came. A lot of Irish came in that time as well. So before the great wave, only 5% of the American population was Catholic. By the end of the great wave in 1920, it had tripled. More than tripled to 17% was Catholic. So that's the era we're talking about. And it was also the era of a lot of other cultural changes. The country, this is just after the Civil War. The country is expanding westward. This is sort of the cowboy era of the Western expansion into the Rocky Mountains and out to California. You've got the California Gold Rush. All of that's happening. So this country that had been primarily centered around the east coast and the old English colonies had expanded really far westward beyond the Mississippi. By this point, you have massive technological changes with railroads, telegraph, and eventually radio. You have industrialization happening. This is the Gilded Age, when steel and oil and all these other industries are really exploding in America and transforming our economy, transforming our cities. So it was a time of massive cultural and demographic upheaval. And what you find by the 1920s is there's this massive backlash to all of these changes because people see the country transforming. They see it not just technologically and economically, but they realize our culture is changing. And a piece that I talk about in the video that some of you may not be aware of, but in the early 20th century, the definition of who qualified as white was very different than it is today. In the early 20th century, to be classified as white by the Census Bureau or by the government, you had to be a northern or Western European Protestant. So Catholics were not defined as white people in America. If you were Italian or Greek, you were not white. If you were Jewish, you were not white. If you were from Eastern Europe, you were not white. You may have light complexion skin, but you weren't qualified as white. And so in the 1920s, there's this perception that America is losing its white Protestant identity, and it's losing some of the cultural markers and values that had dominated the country for its first hundred, 150 years of its existence. As it expands westward, the backlash comes in a few forms. One is many people look at the 1920s as the second great surge in, in the KKK. The first surge happened immediately after the Civil war in the 1870s. But by the 1920s, the generation that had fought the Civil War was beginning to die off. And there's this newfound sort of nostalgia for the Civil War era. And especially in the south, there's nostalgia for the Old Confederacy. And that, combined with the influx of Jewish and Catholic immigrants during the great wave, brings the KKK to the forefront. Some people don't realize this, but the. The largest concentration of KKK members in the United States was in Indiana. It's not in Mississippi or Alabama or some, you know, deep Southern state. It was Indiana. It was mainstream for white Americans to join the KKK as their way of expressing disillusionment or resistance to the cultural changes that were going on. At the same time, the KKK is having this resurgence in the 1920s, there's also the popularity of this pseudo science known as eugenics. Eugenics was. I don't have time to get into all that, but eugenics was this idea that the human race could either be improved or degraded through breeding like you would with animals or livestock or whatever. And there was this big movement to prevent inferior genes from entering the gene pool. And those inferior genes could come from people who are of low intelligence, people who have mental disorders, and in many Americans, view people who were not from the right stock of ethnic background. There were congressional hearings about how the influx of southern European Catholics and Jews was poisoned, poisoning the blood of America. And that if we allow these people in and if we allow them to intermarry, if we allow them to reproduce, it's going to make Americans dumber and the spirit we know of as the American ethos is going to be lost. And so eugenics also caused this great fear that all this influx of new immigrants was bad for America. So what did this all produce? It resulted in a new law being passed in 1924 that known as the Quota Act. The Quota act said that they were going to stop the great wave of immigrants that had been coming in for decades and that the immigration model going forward would be based on quotas, and those quotas were based on the American population. So the idea was, I'm pulling these numbers out of the air. I don't know if they're accurate, but let's say if 30% of Americans are of English descent, then 30% of immigrants allowed to enter the country that year could be from England. If 20% of Americans are German, then 20% of immigrants could be from Germany. If 2% of Americans are Italian, then 2% of the immigrants coming in could be from Italy. It was a way of stabilizing the American population and not have it change more. But here's the tricky part. This 1924 Quota act law based the numbers, based the quotas not on the 1920 census, which was the most recent census data that the country had. Instead, it was based on census data from the late 1800s before the Great Wave occurred. So the real goal of The Quota act was not to maintain America's ethnic makeup, but actually to reverse it, to go back to the way it used to be in the 1800s. In other words, the goal of the Quota act was to make America white again. So this Quota act severely cut off the spigot of Catholic, Southern European and Jewish immigrants coming into the US it was this quota act that prevented Jews who were fleeing the Holocaust in the 1930s and 40s from entering America. We literally stopped ships from docking in the US that were filled with Jewish immigrants, refugees fleeing the Nazis and made them go back to Europe because Quota act wouldn't allow more Jewish immigrants into the U.S. the other thing that happened in response to this backlash against immigrants and the changing demographics of America was the government undertook or at least attempted to undertake mass deportations in the 1930s. There was a write up about this in the New York Times, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But in the 1930s there was a fear that immigrants were also coming in from the southern border, the land border with Mexico and Central America, and the government wanted to get rid of them also. The interesting thing is from what I've read about this, that the effort to actually round up and deport these folks was not very effective. It didn't work very well. But what did work was the fear that this initiative created. There was this combining with the KKK, the eugenic stuff, the Quota act of 1924, this general anti immigrant vibe, and then the government's effort to round up and deport Latino immigrants. It created such an a charged atmosphere of anti immigrant racist stuff that it led to vigilante crime. And if you've studied what happened in the south during the Jim Crow era, you know that vigilante crime lynchings are what were responsible for a lot of black Americans who had lived in the south escaping. They left the south as refugees and came north to midwestern cities especially to try to escape the racial violence they were experiencing. Well, it doesn't get reported as much, but there was also racial violence against Latinos in the south and especially border states during the 1930s. And most of the people who ended up leaving the country during that era, it wasn't because they were rounded up by the federal government and deported. They self deported because they also experienced so much vigilante violence and discrimination that they just basically decided whatever economic or cultural freedoms we may have experienced here in America aren't worth it. We'd rather go back to Mexico, we'd rather go back to our country of origin than deal with this race, this vigilante violence. So just as African Americans fled north to escape the violence, some Latinos fled further south, returning back to Central and South America. So that was the vibe in the 1930s, 1920s and 30s during that era of strong racist, anti immigrant feelings. And it came after 40, 50 years of dramatic demographic change in this country. That's the background, that's the past. And I think there's a lot we can learn from that era to help us explain the era we're in. I said at the beginning that I don't think the backlash we're seeing against immigrants was unpredictable or unprecedented. Because when you look at the conditions that led to the backlash in the 1920s and 30s, they're very, very similar to the conditions we are seeing today. So let me talk about the present now and what conditions have led up to this new found anti immigrant vibe in American culture. So a lot of historians look at the great wave, 1880 to 1920 and argue that we actually have experienced a second great wave of immigration which began in 1965. And I think you could argue ended. Well, the debates, I mean, the date is debatable, but I would say it definitely ended by 2020 with COVID So that era was triggered by a new immigration law that was passed by President Johnson in 1965 called the Hart Cellar Act. Again, I get into all of this in that video in greater depth. The Hart Cellar act was an attempt to reform the quota immigration law from 1924. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was going around the world trying to win more and more post colonial freed countries to the Soviet sphere of influence. And of course America was going around saying, don't join the Soviets, join the west, join America. And America was saying, you know, we believe in freedom and opportunity and equality and all these great American ideals. And the Soviets were going around saying, you know, those Americans are full of crap, they're total hypocrites, they talk a good game about freedom and equality and all that. But when you actually look at America and you look at the racism, the segregation in the south and their immigration laws, they're actually racist. And it's really only for Protestant white people that these things apply. And unfortunately, the Soviets had a point. There was a lot of hypocrisy in America at that time. So first the Kennedy administration and then the Johnson administration realized, if we're going to make more headway with winning the hearts and minds of global people to the American side of the Cold War, we got to change some of These laws partly what led to the civil rights reforms of the South. And it's also what led to the Hart Celler act, this change in America's immigration policy. So they technically, through this bill, through this law, they got rid of the quota system and said, no, no, no, America is open to people coming here from parts of the world that are brown, frankly. Latino people, Asian people, South Asian people, African people, were open to immigrants from anywhere in the world coming to America. That's what the Hart Cellar act was intended to communicate. And technically it did. But there was this interesting problem because when the Johnson administration put this bill forward again primarily as a Cold War initiative to try to win hearts and minds of global people, a bunch of Southern Congressmen were really upset about it because they didn't want to see brown immigrants coming into this country. There was still a lot of Dixiecrats in the Congress at the time, a lot of racist, segregationist folks in Congress at the time. And they were like, there's no way they were going to go along with this. So they ended up amending the bill with a really interesting idea. Again, details are in the video. They introduced this amendment known as family reunification. And what it basically said was, yeah, yeah, we're going to be open to immigrants coming from anywhere in the world to America, but we're going to give special treatment and kind of move to the front of the line, immigrants who already have family in America. And it was their way of basically saying, wink, wink, we're still going to have the quota system because most Americans are white. And therefore, if you are a white immigrant who already have family here in the US you get to come in first. And once we reach our limits, then we shut off immigration for the year, and the brown people at the back of the line aren't going to be able to get in. And so Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, Ted Kennedy was one of the primary sponsors of this bill, a Democrat from Massachusetts. Of course, President Johnson had been from Texas. And so they both kind of went to their Southern Democrat, Dixiecrat segregationist colleagues and said, listen, listen, listen, don't worry, it's not going to change the demographics of the country. We're still going to be white. It's still the quota system. It just is going to give us a better talking point to refute the rhetoric of the Soviets as they go around the world. So in 1965, the bill passes, Johnson signs it. It's the law. Well, it backfired amazingly spectacularly because that family reunification idea that the Southern race.
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Phil Vischer
Don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post plus subscriber. So head over to holypost.com skypod and sign up for just $5 a month. Not only will you get uninterrupted episodes of the Sky Pod, which means you'll never have to hear this dumb announcement again, but you'll also get access to everything else at HolyPost+, including episodes of Getting Schooled by Caitlin, Chess, bonus interviews, live streams, the Holy Post Book Club, exclusive merchandise, and a whole bunch more. And you'll get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing that you're supporting our work of creating smart, pro neighbor Christian content. So head over to holypost.com skypod and subscribe today.