Giuliani in ‘94: illegal aliens are a positive good for America

Ben W. writes:

At a June 1994 press conference, Mayor Giuliani decried anti-illegal immigration policies as unfair and hostile:

“Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens,” Giuliani said at the time. “If you come here and you work hard and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you’re one of the people who we want in this city. You’re somebody that we want to protect, and we want you to get out from under what is often a life of being like a fugitive, which is really unfair.”

Hmmm…as bad a revelation of his words is the fact that he financially contributed to Planned Parenthood.

After details of his marital affairs, his contributions to PPP, and now this approval of illegality, what is really left of him in any moral sense? What “conservative values” (if any) does he embody?

LA replies:

I see this news emerged in the context of an attack by Mitt Romney on Giuliani for his past record on illegal aliens.

I have actually defended Giuliani on his “sanctuary” policies in New York on the basis that he was not defending illegal immigration as such, but rather was saying (I’m summarizing his position):

“The federal government has let these people into the country, they’re here, and we have to deal with them, therefore we want them to feel free to report crimes, to take themselves to hospitals if they have infectious illnesses, and so on.”

My point in defending Giuliani was the same as I’ve used in relation to Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court decision that said illegal alien children should be able to go to public school. I argued that, given our society’s commitment to equal treatment, once we admit vast populations of illegals into the country, communities are inevitably going to start adjusting to their presence, by making public services including schools available to them, and by ceasing to enforce the law on them. Therefore no Band-Aid would stop the growing accommodation of our society to illegals. The only thing that would work would be to stop them from coming in, and to remove the ones that are here.

However, in this 1994 press conference, Giuliani was giving a very different message from the one I thought he had given. He was not discussing the City’s accommodation to illegal aliens as something that was necessary though regrettable. He was describing the illegals as a positive good for our society.

This quote should be held over him until he fully renounces it. And if he doesn’t, everyone will know that he’s pro illegal immigration, and that his opposition to the Bush-Kennedy Destroy America Act was a tactical ploy.

- end of initial entry -

Alex K. writes:

To go with that Giuliani quote Ben W. sent, see this, from the NY Times, April 2007:

As other anti-immigration movements spread across the country in 1990s, Mr. Giuliani consistently pushed back. “The anti-immigration issue that’s now sweeping the country in my view is no different than the movements that swept the country in the past,” he said in 1996. “You look back at the Chinese Exclusionary Act, or the Know-Nothing movement—these were movements that encouraged Americans to fear foreigners, to fear something that is different, and to stop immigration.”

He described what was primarily a backlash against illegal immigration as “anti-immigration” and he said flatly that it was no different from the Chinese Exclusionary (sic) Act and amounted to xenophobia.

So that’s Giuliani. And he’s said nothing to indicate change. On the contrary, he regularly addresses the subject by saying dramatically “It is possible to believe/I believe we can end illegal immigration,” pausing dramatically so the grandeur and conviction of the statement can register on the suckers, and then proceeds to describe the technical process of border security (with lots of hoopla about how he’ll use tracking techniques similar to what he and Bratton used to monitor crime in NY—don’t forget, folks, he’s the law and order guy, he must reject immigration anarchy!) and biometric ID cards. But if the talk goes deeper into the subject he eventually says (I heard him just the other week on a radio show) that we need guest workers and the economy would collapse without high immigration and America cannot close itself off to the rest of the world. After he denounced Tancredo’s call to reduce/pause legal immigration one of the hosts said that he (the host) was sympathetic to Tancredo’s point because of the need for assimilation. Giuliani briefly said that assimilation was important, paying about two or three seconds of barely lip service to the issue, but that we must never close ourselves off to the world and also the economy collapsing thing.

Giuliani is a great example of a phenomenon on the immigration issue that a lot of people don’t get—mass immigration advocacy and softness on illegal migration is not merely a sappy, sentimental, hippie position. (Nor merely an ethnic lobbyist position or cheap-wage plutocrat position.) In many it is a steely, aggressive, quasi-religious position, emanating from some of the same places as the sappy position—Ellis Island worship, ancestral loyalty—but manifesting in a tough, tribal, or even paranoid and resentful way. It is completely compatible with a tough crimefighting warmongering S.O.B. like Giuliani. Like Giuliani shrewdly said in one debate that he’d like to thank Tancredo for saying he was soft on illegal immigration or border control—“it’s rare that I’m accused of being soft on anything!” Well obviously Giuliani is extremely soft on illegal immigration. But he cleverly played off the perception that tough guys are tough on illegals and people who aren’t are necessarily longhaired hippies.

(This isn’t to discount the likelihood that Giuliani also genuinely buys into the economic argument for mass unskilled labor—or that his business support has bought him into it.)

Possibly the biggest thing that worries me about Giuliani is that his passion for immigration, so strong that he believes outrageous garbage like the above NYT quote, combined with his toughness and resolve and willingness to be combative will make him the GOP presidential option most dangerous to immigration reform in the next decade, possibly worse than some of the Democrats. Much of what hope there is for immigration control rests on the weathervane nature of most politicians, as we saw with welfare reform, as we’ve seen in the encouraging revolt of the last couple years that has forced Congress to move from open borders insanity to at least dabbling with enforcement-first legislation. But someone stubborn and scrappy and with that kind of steely, quasi-religious irrationality about mass immigration, that’s probably the worst case scenario.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 08, 2007 06:26 PM | Send