House of Eratosthenes

I’ve defended Rudy Giuliani from slander here and here, but I’ve set him aside as a non-viable candidate, one rendered unacceptable until such time as something enormously huge changes. JohnJ, writing in an offline, wanted to know why. Without quoting from the actual exchange, I thought my reply was worth a broadcast. It includes some points about illegal immigration that are not, to the extent I can see, discussed very much anywhere — and really should be.

Well, I’m plum-pleased to see you’re sticking around and are going to be visible. You’re a sharp guy and have some well-thought out positions on things, although of course you and I don’t agree on everything. Hey, life would be boring if everybody did.

I do agree with the Giuliani platform on many things, and I’ve defended him against some of the slurs against him. And it’s taken me awhile to put him in my purgatory, but I think my reasons are pretty sound.

On immigration, although I do understand his plans have to do with moving the immigrants out of the illegal status, I make an important distinction between sending a violator to the front of the line, and toward the back of the line. I really do think that is only fair to the people who are trying to [follow] the rules as they try to get in. I start with the assumption that we have a certain immigration quota, and when you add up the immigrants have have followed the rules to get here to the violators, you’re left with a total that far exceeds the quota. The result is that when someone jumps the turnstyle and then, once here, embarks on a “pathway to citizenship” — this ends up being amnesty in all the ways that matter. Yes, they’re legal when all’s said & done. But by going this round-about method, they’ve effectively been allowed to bypass the quota.

And here’s something else. When someone is here on a temporary visa and they overstay it, they become an illegal immigrant. Even though they aren’t part of the turnstyle-jumpers. But they, too, are allowed to amble down this pathway-to-citizenship. They, too, can skirt the quota. And by being sent to the front of the line instead of to the back of it, they can take priority over other people who are sending lots of money and waiting a long time, just to follow the rules.

Why do they do this? Well, when you follow the rules, your background gets checked out. When you jump the turnstyle, it doesn’t. Once you go down the pathway to citizenship, your background MAY be checked out…maybe…we’re still arguing about how it works. Nobody really knows yet. Such a background check almost certainly will not be effective.

Do we need to check them out? Maybe not. I continue to be told these illegal aliens “work hard.” I’m sure a lot of them do. But you know, you can be a child molester and still work hard; the two are not mutually exclusive. What if 99 percent of the illegal aliens are not child molesting perverts? Well, this leaves us with 120,000 of them that are.

Giuliani would send them to the front of the line, not to the back of it.

Could it be true that 99% of the illegal immigrants are clean? Perhaps it’s true of the students and other temps that overstay their visas. I have strong doubts such a thing can be true of the turnstyle-hoppers. Why hop a turnstyle if you’re clean? Let’s face if — if I’m a poor Mexican farmer and I have two strong, hard-working sons, one’s a documented kiddy-diddler and one has no crime record…the clean son is staying with me. I’m sending the pervert to the United States. I’m going to get a new record for the hard-working son who can use one.

I’d be foolish to do it any other way.

We need to take the health and welfare of our kids seriously, and take national security seriously. I do believe Giuliani would kill lots and lots of terrorists, as I’ve said. But I think Fred would kill a lot more. And he’d send the turnstyle-hoppers to the BACK of the line…the only way to be fair to law-abiding immigrants, keep our borders under control, and give our kids the safety, protection and opportunities they deserve.

The reason I thought it worth posting for the general audience? It’s the facts, you see. It’s not that I embellished them to make Rudy look bad, or left out some of the ones that might have exonerated him. What I did, if anything, was quite the opposite.

In 1997, Giuliani signed a statement of principles which read, “The new laws recently passed by Congress and signed into law by the President unfairly target immigrants in the United States by severely limiting their access to many federal benefits which citizens are entitled to receive.” and “Since legal immigrants work and pay taxes like American citizens, they should be entitled to temporary assistance when they fall into personal difficulty. Furthermore, the denial of federal assistance to legal immigrants in need is patently unfair and arguably unconstitutional and inhumane.” In 1998, Giuliani argued for expanding Medicare, SSI and foodstamp benefits to legal immigrants and also, “Providing full Medicaid coverage to Prucol aliens with HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses”

In April 2006, Giuliani went on the record as favoring the US Senate’s comprehensive immigration plan which includes a path to citizenship and a guest worker plan. He rejected the US House approach because he does not think House Resolution 4437 could be enforced.

In February 2007, in a meeting with California Republicans, Giuliani was quoted as saying “We need a [border] fence, and a highly technological one.” Giuliani also reiterated his support for some sort of path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants after a process to be determined, but added that at the end of the process the immigrants should “display the ability to read and write English” and must assimilate into American society. In 2000, Giuliani said, “I wish that we would actually make America more open to immigrants.” He does not believe in deportation of illegal immigrants and advocates a “tamper-proof” national ID card and database for illegal immigrants.

On September 7, 2007, during a CNN interview, he said that illegal immigrants are not criminals.

Send…the violators…to the back…of the line. There is no reason not to. To propose anything else, is to grease the skids for more turnstyles to be hopped.

I do not think that everybody who wants to grease those skids, is bent on smuggling terrorists into the country. I think what they’re doing, is helping to smuggle terrorists into the country without consciously realizing it. I think they’re trying to make it more economically practical for labor-intensive businesses to operate outside of the law…and by accident, they’re leaving the door open for sleeper cells — and child rapists — to come marching in.

Oh yeah, they’ll protest that. They’ll call me a bigot and a racist and a xenophobe. But that’s just a campaign slogan, a cheap, poorly designed rhetorical tactic used to shout down the opposition. The motive is to make it easier for immoral businesses to operate…and they have no idea what kinds of bedfellows they have, in that effort.

And Rudy is their leader. He’s made it very plain he’s dedicated to the bumper-sticker slogans, and the legislation, of the “Make The Border Meaningless” crowd. Fence, schmence. The folks on his side, want to build…an escalator that works only half the time. And they say “Ooh, look, we’re not open-borders advocates, it’s really HARD to get in this country. See? The escalator only runs half the time.”

This country is under attack. From people who want to impose methodical, deliberate harm on American citizens to make political statements…and from people who want to impose non-methodical, haphazard, sexually-motivated harm on our women and children. Can we please act like this is what is going on, and make a priority out of confronting these threats?

I have no reason to look at Giuliani as someone who will do this. Just a lot of Rudy fans who want me to think that. Some of whom I respect very highly, but still, just because they want me to think it is no reason to think it. He’s a “pumice border” advocate, and a rather brazen one at that.

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- House of Eratosthenes | 12/06/2007 @ 04:41
Interesting points, Morgan. First of all, I’ll take my wiki with a grain of salt, please. Second, I’m not aware of a presidential candidate who’s offering a workable alternative/solution to the immigration problem…above and beyond what Giuliani is saying. Giuliani is above all a pragmatist. “Deport ’em ALL” is great jingoistic rhetoric, but it ain’t gonna work. Not in this America, or any other America I can (or want to) envision.

“Send ’em to the back of the line” is all well and good, but what do they…the 12 million illegals that are currently here… do in the mean time? Where do they go, literally, while standing in the back of that line that is so ridiculously long and ill-managed as to be worthless as tits on a boar? The corollary to “send ’em to the back of the line” is deport them, is it not? And just HOW do you propose we DO that? Boxcars? Mass round-ups by the National Guard?

There’s an interesting scenario unfolding in Arizona as we speak, and one that bears watching. And one of the the core constituencies of the Republican Party…small business owners…are right in the thick of it. One of the side-effects of this impending law is the illegal labor supply is exiting Arizona in droves, and guess who’s pissed? Farmers, small business owners, and the like. This situation is the national immigration issue writ small, and it’s getting pretty danged ug-leee.

To state the obvious: the immigration issue is complex, thorny, and probably has no “good” solution(s). Working our way thru it is gonna take a LOT of compromise. More to the point, working through it is going to take both a leader and a manager. Someone who has experience, in other words. I see Rudy as having the requisite experience, something I find lacking in all the other candidates.
- Buck | 12/06/2007 @ 16:06
Good points all, Buck, and JohnJ has been beating me up about exactly the same sorts of stuff.

>The corollary to “send ‘em to the back of the line” is deport them, is it not? And just HOW do you propose we DO that? Boxcars? Mass round-ups by the National Guard?

Yeah, you got it.

I know this would make for a huge mess o’frightening pictures, probably in black & white, probably in the NY Times and other esteemed publications, leading to a ferocious popular backlash.

I don’t care. What you have to keep in mind is the motive for hopping the turnstyle, and in so doing, assuming a new identity. Obviously, the folks who aren’t too fond of their old one, would find that a more pleasing prospect.

So in my mind, I presume they are kiddy-diddlers until it’s “proven” otherwise. And these folks have no real names, so you can’t prove otherwise.

What we have here is a choice between protecting those businesses, and protecting kids. If the G.O.P. is all about sacrificing the second of those two for the good of the first, then it doesn’t deserve to be around anymore. And neither do those businesses.

It’s high time we all woke up to what kind of price we’re really paying for all this. We’re exposing our kids to predators, so we can pay 90 cents for a head of lettuce instead of three bucks. It’s just not worth it.
- mkfreeberg | 12/06/2007 @ 16:44
I’ve never liked the “what are you going to do, deport all 12 Million of them?” argument. It’s always seemed to me a bit like arguing a “path to freedom” for murderers. After all, you can’t catch all murderers, so why not just leave them all be?

No, you deport them as you find them, just like you enforce any other law. And what happens is people start to realize that breaking the rules (on both the farmers’/employers’ side and on the labor side) is not the most attractive option.

You’re here to work? Fine. Here’s a worker’s visa. It’s not citizenship. But it’s legal. I think everybody’s cool with that. You want citizenship? That’s another process. You wanna vote? Better be a citizen first. You want a drivers’ license? Let’s see your visa. Your drivers’ license will have a green bar across the top or some obvious identifying mark. You break one of our laws? You stay in one of our jails, sentenced by one of our judges. You don’t agree to that? Don’t come here.

It’s what makes “here”, here.

You want to hire people who aren’t here legally? We got jails for that, too.
- philmon | 12/06/2007 @ 17:57
I don’t care. What you have to keep in mind is the motive for hopping the turnstyle, and in so doing, assuming a new identity. Obviously, the folks who aren’t too fond of their old one, would find that a more pleasing prospect.

So in my mind, I presume they are kiddy-diddlers until it’s “proven” otherwise. And these folks have no real names, so you can’t prove otherwise.

Oh, but I can, albeit only anecdotally. My first wife was Hispanic, born In the US of A, of naturalized parents. But. I knew lots and lots of the relatives from the Old Country (Mexico), legal and illegal, both. And most of them were hard-working, honest folks. “Salt of the earth,” if you like. And the ones that weren’t honest and hard-working met bad ends, as it were. Like most things in life, your POV changes…sometimes radically…when you encounter the “other.” I’ve seen the Other, drank with the Other, played with their kids, and am sympathetic to their plight. YMMV, but mine does not.

Just sayin’.
- Buck | 12/06/2007 @ 20:02
Buck, you have long ago earned “friend o’Buck is a friend o’mine” status around these parts, so I’m sure those must have been very decent people indeed for you to give them that kind of respect. I hope you can appreciate the meaningful distinction between calling them out as child molesters, and raising the point that the law has no choice but to treat them that way.

Because that is the situation exactly as it exists. You can make an argument that those folks from your anecdote are worthy of a license to break the law. You can even make it convincing. My point is, once we make the decision to award that kind of license, we can’t do it with surgical precision. We have to do it with the entire class of 12 to 16 million illegal aliens. It is a monolithic, indivisible set.

Who made that situation? I didn’t; you didn’t. Meanwhile, I have some anecdotes too. You know I can go out and gather anecdotal evidence from others, and you know some of these stories are gut-wrenching.

I hear what you’re saying, that decent people may have committed an infraction that isn’t indicative of their inner character and they should be given a chance to atone. The point I think you’re missing is that the folks who were in line when those people cut to the front of it — they’re still in line. There is a LOT of waiting involved. The quota is pretty demanding; it’s like in the 200k to 260k range PER YEAR. Compare that to the 700k to 1M per year we have coming in because other people can’t, or don’t want to, wait. The people following the rules are nice, too. They have kids you can play with, too.

I know you have the gift of being able to see the good in people, but what I’m explaining here is just “Why We Follow Rules 101” stuff. Surely you’ve noticed that when people chomping at the bit to find something negative to say about America, do indeed find something, and it’s a valid complaint, it always has to do with our failure to maintain basic fairness.

America has some dumbass laws on the books…but equal enforcement of those laws is supposed to be one of our guiding principles.

I’m looking at what you might call “Elian Gonzalez” episodes in which we allowed for inconsistency in our enforcement of (good/dumbass/in-between) laws, because we became sympathetic to the plight of some unfortunate figure we came to know personally. What I’m looking for is such an episode, in which we did NOT end up doing injury to someone else. I have yet to see it happen, even once; in the realm of my knowledge, every time a waiver is handed out to someone visible, someone else unseen pays for it. Always. You’ve had a lot of experiences I have not had. Do they directly address that?
- mkfreeberg | 12/07/2007 @ 11:11

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