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Rudy Giuliani on Immigration
This candidate has withdrawn from the election
If anybody is here illegally, they should never get to be put ahead of a line of people that are here legally. They should have to pay a penalty, because there should not be amnesty. It's a civil wrong. Civil wrongs are compensated by paying penalties. They should pay the back taxes. And if you ultimately find a way to make them citizens, then there should be a very, very strong requirement that they speak English, read English, write English, and understand American history.
[Giuliani] supports providing a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants, but not ahead of those in the system legally. Says that illegal immigrants must pay back-taxes, penalties and learn English and American history before gaining citizenship.
"The president is right to support a guest-workers program," Giuliani said. "If we recognize it, document it, photograph it and know who and what it is, then we can concentrate our attention on the people who aren't coming in to be guest workers but are coming in to bomb us, or coming in to sell heroin or cocaine or to launder money."
Giuliani strongly supported a guest worker program supported by President Bush.
Well, first thing you're going to do is you're going to build a fence -- physical and technological. ... The technological fence will alert the Border Patrol that you'll preposition along the border to people coming over. And then the idea is you've got to get the Border Patrol -- you've got to have them prepositioned in the right places. And within a half hour, 45 minutes, you get them there and you stop the people from coming in. And then you do a border stat program that helps you analyze where people are coming in so that you can predict where they're coming in and have your Border Patrol even better prepositioned. ... And then a tamper-proof I.D. card for every foreigner in this country with biometric data, fingerprints ... so you can be sure who the person is. You record that on entry, you record all exits, which the bill that they put together wasn't going to record. I don't know how you can not record exits. And then we get control of this.
I hope President Bush puts his energy now into building the fence, building a technological fence, increasing the size of the Border Patrol and creating order at the border, which is all that anyone's asking for.
People that come in illegally we gotta stop. You stop illegal immigration by building a fence, a physical fence and then a technological fence. You then hire enough Border Patrol so they can respond in a timely way. And then, if anybody becomes a citizen, we should make certain that they can read English, write English and speak English, because this is an English speaking country.
So everything else has to kind of serve that purpose. A fence - a physical fence - very effective. A technological fence, in certain places [will be] very, very effective; meaning, photographic technology, heat sensing technology, different kinds of technology, all toward the goal of identifying everyone coming in to the United States.
"I would do exactly what one of my predecessors did...sign executive order 124. That executive order protects illegal and undocumented immigrants in several respects from being reported to the Immigration and Naturalization Service."
"What we will try to do is interpret this as narrowly as we can,'' he said. ''We can remind people that no one is required to turn in the names of illegal aliens, and we can encourage people not to do that."
Q: Mayor Giuliani, I want to follow up on what Governor Romney said. In New York City, you allowed illegals to report crime and to seek medical treatment, you said in the interests of public safety. But, in fact, you went a lot further than that as mayor. Back in 1994, you said the following: "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 a fugitive, which is really unfair." As president, would you continue to protect illegals from what you then called unfair enforcement of our borders? GIULIANI: Chris, you haven't really described the entire extent of the executive order. The first part of the executive order points out that the police should report all illegals suspected of committing a crime, or who have committed a crime. In fact, the year before I was mayor, the immigration service stopped taking names from the police department of people that the police department were reporting. So the problem that I had was, I had 400,000 illegal immigrants, roughly, in New York City. And I had a city that was the crime capital of America. I had to do something intelligent with them. I didn't have the luxury of, you know, political rhetoric. I had the safety and security of the people of New York City on my shoulders. So what I did was, I said -- and I think this a sensible policy: If you are an illegal immigrant in New York City and a crime is committed against you, I want you to report that. Because lo and behold, the next time a crime is committed, it could be against a citizen or a legal immigrant. I said, if you are a child in New York City, of which we had 40,000 to 50,000 to 60,000 illegal immigrant children, did it make sense to leave them on the streets? The federal government deported only 758 people that year from New York City. So the reality is, my programs and policies led to a city that was the safest large city in the country, so they must have been sensible policies.
"New York City was not a sanctuary city. New York City did three exceptions. The three exceptions were to allow children to go to school; to allow those illegal immigrants who were the victims of crime to report the person who assaulted them, beat them up, mugged them; and third, to allow emergency care in the hospitals, which we were required to do by federal law. We had a policy of reporting every single illegal immigrant -- other than those three -- who committed any kind of crime or were suspected of crime, and we reported thousands of them to the immigration service, and a few of them were deported."
Q: You said about illegal immigrant in NYC: "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." If that was good enough for New York, why isn't it good enough for the country? GIULIANI: The focus on immigration should be to know everyone who's in the US. We should have a tamper-proof ID card; we should have a database in which we can identify the people who are in this country. We've got to be sensible about immigration. If we do the kinds of things that some of the [other GOP candidates] are talking about, this country's going to be in greater danger; it is going to be more insecure; we're going to face a situation in which terrorists can find a big underground to hide in. So we need a fence--a technological fence--we need a tamper-proof ID card. And we need a way that people who are working in this country can come forward, sign up for the tamper-proof ID card, get in the database and start paying their way.
2007 Republican Debate in South Carolina May 15, 2007
He has proposed 'tamper-proof' ID cards and a database that would track people in the United States from foreign countries. He says that 'we need people to come forward who are working so they'll get identified, get fingerprinted, get photographed. And then we should focus our attention on the people who don't come forward.
Q: [to Giuliani]: You said in 1994: "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 a fugitive." GIULIANI: I had 400,000 illegal immigrants, roughly, in NYC. And I had a city that was the crime capital of America. I didn't have the luxury of political rhetoric. So I said: If you are an illegal immigrant in NYC & a crime is committed against you, I want you to report it. My policies led to a city that was the safest large city in the country, so they must have been sensible policies.
MR. BLITZER: I see people raising their hands. But the question was, I'd only like those to speak up who believe that English should not necessarily be the official language of the United States. Is there anyone else who stands with Senator McCain specifically on that question? (Giuliani does not respond)