Giuliani's Immigration Problem

Much as he hates to admit it, Rudy loved (most of) those huddled masses

Wayne Barrett
Village Voice
January 15th, 2008

With second-tier finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire ending his year-long frontrunner status, America's Mayor is looking more and more like America's Loser. But polls in Florida and the breakthrough states of Super Tuesday, as well as the split decision in the first two Republican primaries, give Rudy Giuliani a still-plausible chance on the road to this summer's convention. Hope, as Barack Obama would put it, is his only option.

Giuliani was in Florida the night of his Iowa and New Hampshire losses, and that is where he will make his stand on January 29, after laying off in Michigan, Nevada, and even South Carolina. He calls it a "big-state" strategy, though it looks more and more like merely a recognition of his own dismal immediate prospects. If he is staking his candidacy on Florida, however, he will have to come to grips with an issue foremost on Republican voters' minds there: immigration. But his campaign is on a collision course between that wedge issue —exploited the way gay marriage was in 2004—and Giuliani's own immigration résumé.

Giuliani is not just a former New York mayor who has to answer to the GOP for policies that were benevolent to immigrants. Nearly three decades ago, when he was the third most powerful person in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department, he was also its point man on immigration. In the post of associate attorney general, as well as when he was U.S. Attorney in Manhattan in the late '80s and mayor in the '90s, he established a pro-immigrant record that goes far beyond his already-documented support of health care and other benefits for illegals. And if that doesn't play well with Florida primary voters, neither will the time he took a tough stance on immigrants and wound up being rebuked by federal judges—in part for his treatment of Cuban refugees.

The exploitation of immigration as a campaign issue has already shaped the presidential fortunes of three present or onetime frontrunners: John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Giuliani. McCain's early national lead disappeared with his prominent link to a Bush-backed immigration bill considered by every other GOP presidential hopeful, including Giuliani, to be too welcoming. Clinton's slide began when she tried to take both positions on the question of drivers' licenses for illegals in a primary debate. Giuliani all but abandoned Iowa, meanwhile, where polls indicated that immigration was the highest concern for Republican voters, and where his so-called "sanctuary city" record as mayor was near the top of the list of shifting policy positions that hurt him. Giuliani's desperate declaration in December that, as mayor, he wanted to deport all 400,000 of the city's undocumented immigrants but found himself "stuck" with them—a slight variation on his 1994 observation that undocumented immigrants were the kind of people "we want in this city"—became one of the galling contrasts that crippled him in Iowa and diminished his national numbers. ... ( read more )

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