Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: And we're back. Welcome to another episode of the Parish Circuit. Today we're talking about ice.
Well, not that ice. Also not the ICE that you drink to cool off in the winter. Time to cool your bed.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: I'm not prepared for this episode then.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Oh, sorry. You did all the wrong research beforehand. Man, what a bummer. Today we're talking about the Immigrations and Custom Enforcement Agency that's been in the news, you know, all over the national level for months and months and months now. Well, apparently very recently here in the city of Opelousis, we had some guys who got picked up by ICE and they were deposited in the St. Legra parish jail, waiting for, I don't know, I guess the next phase to be taken to only. So there's not a lot of information out there about it right now. What happened. So three guys got rounded up by ice and they got put into the. Into the local prison, local jail, and I guess are waiting for the next steps before they are probably deported.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: A hearing of some sort.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Process has been an interesting thing to follow. And what's. Everybody's got opinions on ice. Have you noticed this? Like, even locally, people have strong opinions about the deportations that are going on.
And so I think it's helpful for us to discuss this because we should. We should frame this correctly. I mean, Appaloosas has, like, four Mexican restaurants.
There's a large Latin American population here.
We have a lot of folks who work affiliated with the racetrack, with the horse track.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it seems to be increasing over the years that I've lived here. It seems to be definitely increasing, a growing demographic.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: There's a lot of folks who work with contractors. We have friends who are contractors, and a lot of their employees are laborers who I don't think necessarily are illegal. I think some of them might have some immigration problems, but not necessarily all of them. And then there's agriculture.
So in the agriculture space, there's tons of laborers. Some of them got their appropriate paperwork, some of them don't.
This is a common thing that we're dealing with here.
And the reactions that we get whenever something like this goes down is people are like, just leave those guys alone. Leave them alone. Stop messing with people. Let them do their thing.
But one of the things that I think that's important to frame is why are these arrests happening?
Right? Like, what's actually.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: What was the sequence of events?
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Right.
And one of the things that's been at least made pretty clear on a national level is the only people that are Being detained and taken out are folks who are or who are here illegally to begin with.
Those are the ones that are getting removed and priority is given to, at least on the national level, violent offenders who are here illegally.
That's the ones that are, you know, supposedly being removed with a degree of priority.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Yes. Now, I think, and probably impossibly, I don't know the details.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: No, we have no idea what's going on with the three local guys. We're not asserting that these are violent people. We're not saying that we have no idea what's going on with these three guys. We're talking about on a national level.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Yeah. If anything, I was gonna say it appears that these. These three guys probably are not suspected of violent behavior. We don't know that. But I'm just saying on the surface, it's not only violent offenders. But that's kind of where we're getting at, I think, with this discussion is what.
Yeah, what are the steps that get you here?
[00:03:32] Speaker A: So I think we should probably step back and say, what is the requirement?
What does the Bible say about things like immigration?
Like, what should we be doing? How do we frame this Christianly and then go from there? And I've got some radical stuff here. Like, I could say some radical things here.
But if we go back and just kind of understand how the Bible teaches and instructs us according to the Old Covenant, especially in the old covenant nations and borders and what is to be expected about people? I think what we would find is that the borders of Israel were surprisingly open. Yeah, like, surprisingly open. You know, there were people who would come in to the nation of Israel and come in relatively easily and dwell among them and be a part of the local scene. They could even go worship, participate in worship at the temple, and they would call them God fearers.
And there was Gentile courts built into the temple because they expected that the gentiles would come in and participate in worship to some degree. They could only participate in the outer courts. They couldn't come into the inner courts. But there were categories for Israel and the sojourner.
In fact, in Israel, whenever the sojourners would come through, there was often this overwhelming hospitality towards them where people would. It was almost like they were arguing and kind of fighting a little bit over getting these people to come into their homes, to be a part of.
To perceive them hospitably.
And I think that's a good picture, a good reminder for us of what an immigration system should look like. And we had something similar to that.
100 years ago, where? 100 years ago. 150 years ago. Yeah.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: As you say, you might have to
[00:05:27] Speaker A: go back a little further than 100 years. Yeah, that's a fair point. A little bit further than 100. But the borders were largely predominantly open, especially in the port cities like New York.
Tons of people were coming in, flooding in all the time for the promise of a new life.
And here's the thing. If you're building a city on a hill, people look at that and they want to be a part of that. And that's good.
That's a good thing.
Right?
We should be welcoming to that. We should be receiving those people.
But, and here's the caveat.
There is a type of assimilation that does happen to those who are coming into a nation.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: And that's where people get hung up. I think with what you were talking about earlier, they'll quote. And there are many passages in the Old Testament that talk about the sojourner, how you treat them.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: The stranger.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Right, the stranger, sojourner. And they'll kind of equate those passages and apply that to an illegal immigrant today.
But what you're getting at is that while the borders were kind of open in one sense in ancient Israel, let's say. Let's use that as an example, when ancient Israel was kind of functioning as it.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: As it should have been. As it should have been functioning, let's
[00:06:45] Speaker B: say, with a reasonably good king and such, right.
There was at the same time a very strong boundary in the form not of, you know, physical guards with bows and arrows or whatever, or walls, but of culture and belief. And this is who we are. And you can come be a part. And they. They even encourage that, sure, you can come participate, but if you cross the line, the. The border, right, and you set up your idol to bail, or you try to lead someone into your, you know, false belief system, basically, if you bring in something that is not of that people, there would have been a very strong reaction.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: You get dealt with. Yeah, yeah. In other words, our people has an identity. And if you're coming to participate, then this is the identity that you're coming into.
Right.
You're not coming here to bring everything that you're leaving with you. Right. There's a reason that you're leaving, that you're leaving that country for a purpose. You're not going to bring the things with you into this new country. And what I've found. So.
[00:07:57] Speaker B: But, Stuart, what you just said goes directly against what we've grown up being told.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: What do you mean,
[00:08:08] Speaker B: are we saying that there's things that we've been told growing up that could be bad?
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Oh, I get it.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: Let's use this one. The. But what about the melting pot?
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Oh, right.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: So.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: So, yes, yes.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: It's been so kind of successfully watered down and.
And used over and over again that it has become kind of a rallying cry of the secular culture. They'll just say, but, like, the melting pot. And that's a good thing, period.
Right. It's just good. You bring in any belief, any culture, any way of thinking, and you just mix them all together and they. And that's an inherently good thing.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: Y' all make. I mean, does that make sense?
[00:08:53] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: You know, we all see. We all see that. Yeah.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, go look at England.
[00:08:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: You don't want to become what is becoming of England right now.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: I have friends who live there.
They literally told me, yeah, you don't want to go to that part of the country.
It's not safe there anymore.
They're losing ground.
They're losing their nation. They're losing their heritage.
And it's sad to see, but the socialist Marxist march through that nation is considerably farther ahead than it is here in America and here in Louisiana, and hopefully we're able to turn the tide and push it back the other way.
But, yeah, the melting pot. That's funny that you say that. I remember receiving that in my elementary head. Like, my elementary school education. They were like, louisiana's a melting pot. Look at all these cultures and beliefs and things that have come in. You said that, and it triggered memories for me.
And it's because we've been attempted to be distinctly indoctrinated by our education system. Go see our past episodes on the schools if you want to understand a little bit more about that. Your education system is an indoctrination station. It is. Period.
Just the question is, what are you being taught in? Are you being taught according to what is true, or are you being taught of something not true, but you're being more educated, more, maybe I should say, inculcated with the culture around you more and more through the education system that you walk through? But anyway, that idea was very much placed into me whenever I was a kid. And looking back now, I could see what the play was.
I could see what they were trying to do.
And today, with the immigration stuff, I would advocate for a much more clear and open path to citizenship for people who are coming to our borders. I totally would.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: But I would do that with an established national identity.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: We're Americans, you know, we're Christians here.
You don't, you don't come in here and bring Muhammad.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: We're not, we're not playing that ball game.
I just offended a lot of people.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now that we've said a couple of nice, nice true offensive things.
Let's, let's.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: But we're flavoring it.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Let's nuance a little bit.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: Yeah, okay, let's.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: So when we, when we critique the kind of the phraseology of the melting pot and how that's just become so blindly accepted as an inherently good thing, we're not saying that, therefore we're like, against the concept of diverse cultures to some degree. Right.
God made the different ethnicities, and those have developed good things by God's grace, by God's common grace. Even outside of Christianity, you could point to amazing feats of architecture or development of food and things like that that are great.
So we're not saying no diversity.
We are talking about, though, a national identity that you come and be a part of.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Because there is such a thing as the United States and there is such a thing as being an American. And that does mean something. We have an incredibly rich history of Christianity, of the Protestant work ethic, of, you know, high trust society, of truths that everybody could kind of get on board with, and it led to an incredible amount of flourishing and stability.
And so again, and that, that's. Lots of different types of people were a part of that. But when you start to just say, no, any diversity is good, that's when we have a problem. Right.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: When you say, well, if, yeah, if we have fundamental disagreements about what morality actually is, how are you going to assimilate into this country?
Like, if you think child brides are great.
And we say, well, probably not. That's probably not an okay thing. You shouldn't do that.
Now we, we have a whole different problem.
Right?
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: Like, we have. We have completely different moral positionings.
If you believe that.
What could we talk about if you, if you believe that?
[00:13:31] Speaker B: Well, sure, let's. Let's throw you the uk. Let's use the UK as an example again.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Because they are convenient. Because we are. We do have a lot of common heritage, but they are further along in kind of the socialistic agenda.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: The open borders, the.
Basically the. Let's tear down nationhood. The condemnation. And what's happening there is Sharia law is being practiced.
And while the official government might not recognize that officially and out loud, like, if you, if you just listen to the people that live there and see it.
There are pockets of people around the country who are practicing a law, you know, within a country.
Not that country's law, but Sharia law, which involves, you know, honor killings of the children if they. If the parents deem it necessary, some very severe punishments, especially of women if they don't adhere to the particular, you know, laws that the Quran describes, prescribes.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: There we go.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: And yes, that'd be an example of, like, that's real.
[00:14:42] Speaker A: That's not. We're not making this up. Like, this is actually happening.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: It's happening. So when we see people coming in, there should be a strong national identity that they're coming to be a part of because they want to and because it's good.
And that should be kind of like the norm.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Yeah. And they're shedding a bit of themselves to come into this new place.
Yeah. So I have family who have. They've come in as immigrants.
Literally, they're still alive today, and they went through the naturalization process and they have their official U.S. citizenship, and it worked. And honestly, those people now are more conservative in many ways than I am sure, because they know where they came from and they know why they left.
Yeah, it's very drastically different in their original. In their countries of origin. And they wanted a better life, and so they came here instead.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: I just thought of another historic example of what you're talking about and how things have changed in people's mindset.
Preaching kind of the melting pot at all costs has changed our thinking. When the Japanese Americans back in World War II were forced into internment camps by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the west coast because they were, you know, they had suspicions that they might be helping the Japanese empire and all that stuff. They. They literally locked them up in concentration camps for several years.
And the Japanese whose possessions were being taken, their property was being taken. And we're not talking about illegal immigrants here. We're talking about Americans. Talking about Japanese Americans who came here who were become. Had become Americans.
And we're living as Americans. Their appeal as their property was being taken, as they were being told, we're going to lock you up for the next several years, was we are Americans.
Right.
They were appealing to their new identity that they had come here and that they were going to be Americans.
But that's not what happens anymore.
Right. When. When there were a bunch of. When there's been a bunch of protests against ICE and things like that in the last year or so, they are not waving the American flag and saying, we are America. We are the. You know, we are really Americans.
They're waving all sorts of other flags.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: And basically saying, we hate America. That's the. That's the messaging that's being conveyed. Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Isn't it interesting how this is. It's almost like it's a fast track to globalism.
I don't think it's going to work.
Just straight talk. I don't think it's going to work in the same sense that nationalism doesn't work. I don't think globalism works.
And I should probably explain that a little bit more. Those are some potentially complicated terms because we're advocating for people to have an American identity upon assimilation into a particular culture and a particular people.
But what do we mean whenever we say nationalism doesn't work? We're talking about. Look at the state of the Union currently, a massive form of government that is increasingly growing all the time, plunging itself into debt in order to fund its quote, unquote growth and placing itself more fragile every year that it continues to happen.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: Yeah. It's a nationalism in the sense that it's putting the nation as ultimate correct.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a. It's not sustainable. This is just. It's just not sustainable.
And instead, what we would advocate for is for a localism, a local people in a local area, which our government model actually structurally supports.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: We are United States.
There's a federalism to what we're doing here. We're a republic. Well, at least on paper.
And that's the way these things are intended to operate. A collection of local representatives on a national level, representing these little fiefdoms that are located all over our country and parishes and cities and counties. If you live outside of Louisiana states,
[00:19:06] Speaker B: it seems like that the system of federalism that our Constitution was written with and what you're describing has kind of died a long, slow death.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Which is part of the reason that we're starting this podcast, because we're trying to push it back. We're trying to say, hey, localism is where we need to be.
Not this nationalistic.
Only care about what's happening on the presidential election years.
Let's pay attention to local events and local politics.
That's where we're pushing. We want to push ourselves into the corners here. We want to die here.
We want to give ourselves to this work.
And so I think what's happening. So to go back to what I was saying earlier, I think what's happening is this mix of nations that is being attempted specifically in first world nations, this mix of nations that is being attempted. I think what's going on is it's a push towards a globalist move.
I think that's part of it, at least, anyway.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Workers of the proletariat of the world unite.
[00:20:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Right now I don't think it's going to work because the folks who are going to.
The divisions that will form, I believe is what we're already seeing in places like Europe, England, Canada, even in the United States in some small pockets, is that people congregate around ideologies.
Right. That becomes their new identity, their new people group, rather than congregating around, like localism. And so. And you even see that, you see that especially online, as people are kind of rallying around certain talking heads, certain thinking people, or at least maybe they like to say that they're thinking people, thought leaders. That's in big air quotes, by the way, when I say that. And so we get. We get rallied around these particular groups. And I think that that's the direction of the country right now. Like, even right now, there's this massive division that's happening between men and women.
Women are moving more and more to the left politically and men are moving more and more to the right politically.
And I. And I think it's because they're. They're kind of operating in their natures and starting to kind of slide more and more towards ideals based on their natures. Men and women are different. There's another offensive thing that I could say today.
Turns out I'm just hitting all the buttons.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Men and women are different.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Yeah.
And so to frame all of this back down, the situation that's going on in St. Landry parish, that's going on all over the country with ICE that's coming in and capturing folks and deporting them.
We would say if they are in the country illegally, then so be it.
And that.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: That.
[00:22:01] Speaker A: I understand that that makes people.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: By so be it, you mean then they should. Then.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: Yeah, they should be deported.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: A nation has the right and responsibility to remove someone who has entered illegally. Yeah. And what's interesting too on that is that was not controversial four years ago.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: Yeah, we were fine with it four years ago. There were people being deported four years ago.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: In fact, I don't know if the current administration has surpassed the previous one or the. Sorry, not the previous one, but the one before that under Obama, I think it was even more. People were deported numerically.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, wasn't that One of his things that he was trying to do was get immigration under control under Obama's terms,
[00:22:47] Speaker B: and people were generally fine with that. He gave. Was it Tom Homan? He gave him an award for the number of people he successfully deported.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: Yeah. So in gist, we should say deportations are not wicked things. If you're in the country illegally, you should strive to become legal, follow the pathways that you have available before you. There are pathways available before you. I just drove to Houston yesterday. There's signs up all over along the interstate trying to help people find attorneys to get their citizenship status taken care of. Yeah, there's. There's pathways. You can do it. I know people that have. It's not as easily navigable as I wish it was. Yeah, it is complicated. It does take a long time. That's discouraging. I wish that it was a simpler system, but then when you come into America, I would say embrace the national identity, become an American citizen, like, all the way down deep. And there's a lot of people who do and have.
And there's a lot of people who aren't interested in that part. And it's going to cause issues. Continuing to cause issues over time.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: Yep, for sure.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: No, and I think it'd be. It'd be amazing if we lived in a time and place where you could have a type of open border, because there was such a strong national identity and culture that people would actually stand up and say, this is who we are.
We do this here. We don't do that.
When it came to what is right and wrong and all those things, we're not there.
So for now.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: Not yet.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: For now. There. There are boundaries.
There are. Yeah, there are boundaries and. And laws and. Yeah, they're necessary.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: That's right. Well, any closing thoughts, Dave?
[00:24:50] Speaker B: No, no. I mean, I think we've. We could. Obviously, we could go into all sorts of other rabbit trails. I think we're. We're probably good right there.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, guys, thank you all so much for listening to another episode of the Parish Circuit. Hopefully, somewhere in this episode you were challenged a little bit to think more thoroughly about immigration and localism and nationalism and globalism and socialism and Islam and all the wonderful things.
And if you've got questions, we would love to talk to you about it.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: I actually just thought of one thing. Can I read a Bible verse?
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Do it.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: All right.
Acts 17:26.
The apostle Paul says to the Athenians, from one man, he made all the nations that they should inhabit the whole earth. And he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.
Some form of people and nation is a biblical concept. We can remember that.
And it's not, you know, there are lines, drawn, references, boundaries. But that doesn't imply some sort of, like, animosity or hatred for other nations or people groups. It's simply how we function. Well, and when we have those covenantal loyalties and. And bonds, you can work towards a goal like becoming more Christlike.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: Amen. Yeah. All right, guys, thank you all so much for listening to this episode. If you got questions, hit us up on our website or on our Facebook page. We would love to talk to you more about it. Thank you. And we'll see you next time.
