Book Excerpt: NYC a haven for illegals under Giuliani

In an interview for the new book “Meet the Next President,” Giuliani lamented that the Immigration and Naturalization Service deported only 700 to 1,500 of the city’s 400,000 aliens each year during his mayoralty. Giuliani said it was obvious the INS was not about to increase deportation “from 700 or 1,500 to 400,000.”

“If they could, I would have turned all the people over. It would have helped me. I would have had a smaller population. I would have had fewer problems,” the Republican presidential candidate told The Examiner in an interview. “But the practical reality was, they were going to make an infinitesimal, statistically insignificant contribution to the problem. I was stuck with it. And no matter what their promises, they weren’t going to do anything about it.”

In fact, according to Giuliani, the INS told his predecessor, David Dinkins, to stop reporting criminals for deportation. Dinkins complied, even though he had re-issued an executive order by his predecessor, Ed Koch, that called for the reporting of illegals suspected of “engaging in criminal activity.”

When Giuliani took over as mayor, he too re-issued the Koch order.

“Why don’t you throw out the people who are drug dealers, that are coming out of jail? And before they hit the streets, we can turn them over,” Giuliani recalled telling the INS. “We couldn’t work that out with them. They wouldn’t do it for us.

“They wouldn’t do it for us because they had, you know, some professor with a visa first, and they had two restaurant workers, and three gardeners. Now it may or may not be right for them to behere, but they’re not threatening anybody. These drug dealers are threatening people. I couldn’t get them to do that, so I had to handle the thing myself. And I handled it.”

Giuliani handled it by cracking down on illegals who broke more than immigration laws. Meanwhile, he adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward everyone else who entered the United States illegally.

“The ones that are causing me no trouble, I’m going to leave them alone,” he told The Examiner. “They’re contributing to the lawful part of the city. I’ve got so many citizens — legal immigrants, and then some illegal immigrants — committing crimes that I’ve got to pay attention to them.”

Similarly, Giuliani concluded that going after school-age illegals would be an empty political gesture.

“I had sixty-[thousand] to seventy-thousand children in school who were illegal immigrants,” he said. “So for the purpose of protecting my backside, I would turn over the names to the immigration service so I could sound like a tough guy? I would end up with fifty-[thousand] to sixty-thousand kids on the street. And crime would go up in New York, not go down.”

So the mayor resigned himself to the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to deport illegal immigrants. In the process, he absolved himself of any blame for the city’s ongoing status as a haven for 400,000 illegals.

“That’s the federal government’s problem,” he told The Examiner. “If you’re not hurting anybody in my city, I don’t care.”

But Giuliani’s “I don’t care” attitude toward illegals sometimes morphed into unabashed cheerleading, as if he were rolling out the red carpet for them.

“Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens,” the mayor said at a 1994 press conference. “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 wantin 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 like a fugitive, which is really unfair.”

The Examiner asked Giuliani why it was unfair to apply fugitive status to someone who broke the law to enter the United States.

“We were going to treat them as a fugitive if they committed a crime,” he replied. “And we weren’t going to treat them like a fugitive if they were being calm and responsible and decent.

“And finally, it didn’t much matter what I did with them,” he added. “The turning over of names to the immigration service was a mere formal act. It was absurd to think that they could possibly handle it. It continues to be absurd.

“In order to deal with the 12 million illegals that are in this country, you would have to take the entire federal, state and local criminal justice systems and multiply it by some factor of seven or eight or nine.”

Instead of attempting such an impossible task, Giuliani said he would concentrate on securing the U.S.-Mexico border if elected president.

Although Giuliani has been savaged by rival Republicans for his record on immigration, he insisted to The Examiner that “immigration is an issue that is not a negative with any Republican voters for me.” He said he wants voters to view his immigration stance in the context of his tough-on-crime credentials.

“My objective was to make New York City safe,” he said. “Illegal immigration and the problem of illegal immigrants was just one of many problems that were part of that whole. So the real question is, did I deal with it intelligently, and did it result in the city becoming much safer? Or did I deal with it stupidly and the city became much more dangerous?”

He believes the answer to that question will calm any fears that voters might harbor about his immigration stance.

“I end up being thestrongest candidate on immigration, for the reason that I ran a city and made it real safe,” he concluded. “And I don’t see any opponent that I have who has ever done nearly as much about bringing down illegality as I have.”

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