Giuliani come lately

Rudolph Giuliani, reversing an entire career of passionate support for illegal immigration and passionate opposition to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws,—a career that culminated in his unsuccessful appeal of and his publicly stated refusal to obey a federal law that forbade local governments from acting as “sanctuary” cities—has, under the pressure the GOP grassroots’ own passion against illegal immigration, come out in favor of a tamper-proof ID card for all people entering the country and a national database to verify that they have left. Michelle Malkin comments:

What Rudy-come-lately fails to comprehend is that there are already multiple alien tracking databases mandated by federal law that have yet to be fully implemented, integrated and used. The reason they don’t work is [that] open-borders interests have sabotaged them by restricting funding for them, objecting to them on civil liberties grounds, and pushing local and state governments to forbid public employees from checking them to verify citizenship status. Ring a bell, Rudy?

Here’s what the G-man said at a 1994 press conference (see the first link above):

Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens. 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.

Unless Giuliani fully renounces the above sentiments, nothing he says about his intent to enforce our nation’s immigration laws can be believed. I hope that at campaign events people in the audience will read this quote back to Giuliani, and also mention his pedal-to-the-metal support for the sanctuary policy, including his publicly stated refusal as mayor of New York to obey federal law, and demand an accounting of him.

As shown by his similarly pedal-to-the-metal efforts to bring his then girlfriend to Gracie Mansion as his official companion at public events while he was still married to his first wife, Giuliani has always been brazenly open in his defiance of decency, morality, and law. And if he was like that as mayor, imagine what he would be like as president!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 15, 2007 12:44 PM | Send