Giuliani toughens immigration stance
By ERIN KELLY
Gannett News Service
Nov 23, 2007

WASHINGTON -- When Rudy Giuliani looks at the city he once governed, he sees the hard work of immigrants who came to this country seeking a better life.
"I know for a fact that New York City would not be the great city it is today if not for the vitality of immigrants," the former mayor proclaimed in a 1998 speech in Washington, D.C.

Today Giuliani, the grandson of Italian immigrants, is under attack by his fellow Republican presidential candidates for fighting federal efforts to stop immigrants in the U.S. illegally from getting medical care at New York's public hospitals or sending their kids to public school when he was mayor. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has hit Giuliani especially hard, denouncing him for running New York City as a "sanctuary" for undocumented workers.

While denying the charge, Giuliani has toughened his stance against illegal immigration as he seeks to win the GOP nomination for president at a time when polls show rising anger about the issue. A New York Times/CBS News poll released earlier this month showed that Republican voters in Iowa, whose January caucus is the first major electoral event for the nomination, named immigration the No. 1 issue and said immigrants in the U.S. illegally should lose their jobs and be forced out of the country.
Giuliani now vows to stop the flow of immigrants over U.S. borders within three years if he's elected president and says he will not offer amnesty to undocumented workers. He recently reveled in ridiculing Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for waffling about whether she supported New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to give driver's licenses to immigrants in the country illegally. Spitzer dropped the plan in the face of overwhelming opposition from New Yorkers.

"Of course you don't give out driver's licenses to illegals," Giuliani said in a radio interview on the syndicated Glenn Beck Program on Oct. 31, before Spitzer's decision to scrap the idea. "Among other things, it'll make it even more difficult to deal with all the fraud, all the forgery that's going on."

Political analysts say that Giuliani is relying on his tough-guy image to make people forget about his liberal stance on immigration as mayor.

"Giuliani can get away with finessing the issue a bit by relying on his image as the guy who is tough on crime and terrorists," said Robert McClure, a political scientist at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. "I think he'll get some forgiveness for his past positions given the fact that most voters will see him as tough enough to deal with the problem."

But William Gheen, president of the Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee, said he has "serious concerns" about Giuliani. Gheen said his group is still researching the candidates' records, but is disturbed that Giuliani appears to favor a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants inside the United States.

Giuliani opposed a 2007 bill in Congress that would pave the way to citizenship for most of the nation's estimated 12 million immigrants in the country illegally, but advocated measures as mayor to make it easier for them to become citizens.

"That's what the Chamber of Commerce and the elite corporate interests in this country want -- they want to keep their chief work force," Gheen said. "They're going to support candidates who say whatever it takes to get elected and then do their bidding when they get in office. We are concerned that's what candidates like Rudy Giuliani may be doing."

Giuliani explains his behavior as mayor by saying that he had to deal the best he could with the federal government's failure to control illegal immigration. The city had an estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants while he was in office and he told local authorities not to challenge their legal status because he wanted them to come forward and report crime. He said he also encouraged their children to attend school to keep them off the streets and out of trouble.

"When I was mayor of New York City, I had to work around it because I couldn't stop illegal immigration," he told radio host Mike Gallagher on Nov. 1. "I had to deal with the consequences of it and I think I dealt with it very successfully because I took a city that was the crime capital, made it into the safest large city in the country. But as a president, what you have to do is stop illegal immigration."

Although Giuliani's record on immigration may not be embraced by most Republican primary voters, he can take comfort in the fact that the other top GOP candidates have mixed records on the issue as well, said Dan Schnur, a California political analyst and veteran Republican campaign strategist.

As Giuliani is quick to point out, Romney ran a liberal state with cities that adopted formal sanctuary policies welcoming illegal immigrants. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee drew the wrath of anti-immigration forces while he was in office for supporting prenatal care for pregnant illegal immigrants and saying their children should be eligible for in-state college tuition. And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was a leading sponsor of a bipartisan immigration reform bill that critics denounced for offering de facto amnesty to undocumented workers by easing their path toward citizenship.

"For conservative voters who've decided that immigration is the most important issue, none of these candidates are perfect," Schnur said. "Giuliani is probably not going to be able to convince conservatives that his record in New York City is good enough. But, given the fact that none of the candidates have spotless records and that he's been taking a pretty tough line on what he would do as president, it's hard to see him losing votes over the issue."


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