Hey, Conservative Rudy Lovers: Read What He Wrote About Illegal Immgrants in 1997:
The Rude Pundit has not made it a secret that he despises Rudy Giuliani. He can't figure out why the hell Giuliani's running for President other than ego, the chance to pardon Bernard Kerik before Kerik goes all state's evidence on Giuliani, and a sad attempt to keep impressing his needy-ass third wife. Really, it makes more goddamn sense for Tom Tancredo to run. At least he's got a principle or two to stand on, odious though those principles may be.
Giuliani has demonstrated that he is a weak, pathetic political animal, willing to abandon any sane beliefs he had in order to desperately pander to the rabid, frothing herd of deranged core conservative voters. He's zigged on abortion, zagged on gay rights, and on treatment of illegal immigrants, he's punked out totally. Giuliani was just endorsed by former California Governor Pete "No Education for Illegal Immigrant Children" Wilson, creating some kind of cretinous tear in the fabric of humanity.
Mitt Romney and Giuliani, two pink-dressed girls whose slap fights are comically entertaining, got into it during the summer over illegal immigration, with Romney accusing Giuliani of making New York City into a safe haven for illegals. Giuliani said he no like lawbreakers. But let's let 1997 Giuliani do the talking here
In a strangely unmentioned Wall Street Journal editorial from January 9, 1997 titled "Keep America's Door Open," Giuliani wrote about what he saw as the proper treatment of illegal immigrants in a way that most non-Kucinich Democrats couldn't get away with now:
"Why shouldn't city employees turn undocumented immigrants over to the INS? Because if immigrants fear being caught and deported, they will avoid the police, hospitals and schools--to the detriment of the entire city. If the federal government fails to fulfill its responsibility to keep undocumented immigrants out of the U.S., then we must afford them certain protections to preserve the health and safety of all Americans.
"A criminal who victimizes an undocumented immigrant might attack a legal resident next. Discouraging the reporting of crimes would make it more difficult for the police to track criminal activity. New York now leads the nation in crime reduction, but we cannot catch criminals, prevent crime and protect the public if we don't have accurate information about where and when crimes are occurring.
"Immigrants who fail to seek medical care for fear of deportation also pose a substantial danger to the general public. The misguided new federal law could result in the spread of serious communicable diseases that might easily have been contained if diagnosed and treated early."
(Remember, by the way, that this seemingly rational approach to the place of illegal immigrants in urban America was written by the current leading Republican presidential candidate. Alas, sweet flip-floppery. But let Rudy continue here.)
"And parents who fear deportation might not send their children to public schools. If not in school, some 80,000 children of undocumented immigrants would be on the streets of New York or left alone in apartments. Not only would they suffer irreversible damage, but so many unsupervised children would endanger public safety in the entire city.
"What's more, there is no indication that vastly increasing the number of names reported to the INS would even lead to substantially more deportations. The federal government seldom deports undocumented immigrants, even when the INS has established their identities. In New York City, which has an estimated 400,000 undocumented immigrants, only about 1,500 are deported each year. While the recently enacted illegal-immigration law provides new funding for deportation, still less than 1% of the undocumented immigrants already in New York would be deported each year. If the federal government wants to stop illegal immigration, it should work diplomatically with other governments and better secure our national borders, not endanger public safety by recklessly denying critical services to people already here."
There you go, conservatives, who think you wanna go with Rudy. Pre-9/11, before he went even madder with power, Giuliani believed we should all pay for health care and education and police protection for illegal immigrants. Sure, there's a certain amount of buck-passing, blaming the federal government, but in our current rhetoric about immigration, was not Giuliani encouraging illegal immigration?
Indeed, if you are a conservative so concerned about the issue, would it not seem that when Giuliani was mayor of New York, he actually made the problem worse?
