Giuliani is taking a harder line on border

WASHINGTON —  After Congress passed a landmark welfare law with support from both parties, one prominent mayor became furious. His concern: a provision that would lead, he believed, to the “inhumane” treatment of illegal immigrants. He promptly dispatched his lawyers to file suit against the federal government.

This was no bleeding-heart liberal championing the rights of illegal immigrants, but the Republican mayor of New York, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

“I believe the anti-immigration movement in America is one of our most serious public problems,” Giuliani said in announcing the lawsuit in 1996. “I am speaking out and filing this action because I believe that a threat to immigration can be a threat to the future of our country.”

Today Giuliani is running for president, and one of his leading GOP rivals, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, is pointing to his record as mayor to accuse him of being soft on illegal immigration. That charge threatens to undercut the image Giuliani has sought to cultivate as the law-and-order champion best equipped to keep the U.S. safe.

Under attack, Giuliani is striking a tougher, less welcoming tone toward illegal immigrants. He is calling for stricter border control, tamper-proof identification cards for noncitizens and the deportation of foreign-born criminals.

But his substantial record on immigration is likely to ensure that the issue remains a point of tension throughout the primary campaign. Indeed, immigration is one of several social issues -- including abortion and gun control -- on which Giuliani’s relatively liberal stances have been fodder for rivals who say he has proved himself out of step with the conservative base.

As mayor, Giuliani was the rare Republican who rolled out the welcome mat for legal and illegal immigrants. He took his legal challenge to the welfare law as far as he could, appealing to the Supreme Court. He lobbied Congress against other measures he considered punitive. Although he worked to deport illegal immigrants who committed crimes, he defended others as valuable contributors to the city’s economy and culture.

“Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens,” he 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.”

Giuliani’s stance as mayor was all the more remarkable because it placed him out of step with the nativist feelings that were sweeping much of the country and that had become prominent within the Republican Party. Two years before Giuliani sued over the welfare law, California voters passed Proposition 187 to cut off public services to illegal immigrants. Congress was cracking down even on legal immigrants.

Liberals who disliked other aspects of Giuliani’s administration swooned over his advocacy on behalf of immigrants. “He was like a beacon of light in a storm,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum.

Giuliani’s campaign rhetoric today sidesteps the question of what to do about the millions of illegal immigrants already in the U.S. But when he was mayor, those immigrants were a significant presence in his city.

Illegal immigrants had become key to New York’s economy and a substantial part of the city’s culture. Giuliani casts his approach to immigration as more pragmatic than ideological, in contrast with many Republicans.

“I had 400,000 illegal immigrants, roughly, in New York City,” Giuliani said at a recent debate. “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.”

That viewpoint led Giuliani to continue an executive order, first established in the late 1980s under Mayor Edward I. Koch, that prohibited city employees from reporting to federal authorities the immigration status of people seeking city services.

Romney charges that offering this kind of protection turned New York into a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants.

Giuliani said there was a solid rationale to the policy.

Unless they were guaranteed that their status would not be disclosed to federal authorities, illegal immigrants would not send their children to school, seek medical care or cooperate with police. Giuliani reasoned that it was good for the entire city for all residents to obtain medical treatment rather than spread disease, and for children to be in school rather than on the streets.

He considered the policy integral to his focus on law and order: He worried that police would be hamstrung if illegal immigrants, fearing deportation, did not report crimes.

Giuliani acknowledged that the policy offended some who wondered why taxpayers should pay for services for illegal immigrants.

“The answer is: It’s not only to protect them, but to protect the rest of society as well,” Giuliani said at the time.

But in 1996, Congress included in the welfare bill a provision specifying that no city employee could be prohibited from giving immigration-status information to federal authorities.

Saying the effect of the provision would be “inhumane and indecent,” Giuliani went to court, though many allies believed he had little chance of succeeding. Indeed, he lost at the district court and appeals court levels, and the Supreme Court refused to take up the case.

People who knew Giuliani as mayor believe his open-arms approach to immigrants had a personal dimension: He was the grandson of an Italian immigrant. But as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city packed with foreign-born people, being pro-immigrant was also smart politics. Though his views were controversial and out of step with his party nationally, they were popular in New York’s vast immigrant community.

The suit challenging the welfare law was part of Giuliani’s effort to establish a high profile as an advocate for immigrants.

He successfully lobbied Congress to repeal a provision of the welfare bill that would have cut off federal benefits such as food stamps to legal immigrants. Giuliani also lobbied against a 1996 measure to bar children of illegal immigrants from public schools.

In 1997, Giuliani invited thousands of public officials from around the country to New York City for an immigration conference. He criticized Proposition 187 and cheered its demise in 1998, when it was struck down in court.

“There isn’t a mayor or public official in this country that’s more strongly pro-immigrant than I am,” he said in 2000.

Although he did not condone illegal immigration, Giuliani often treated it as practically inevitable.

“We’re never going to be able to totally control immigration to a country that is as large as ours,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Those words have come back to haunt him. A video of that 1996 speech began circulating on YouTube this summer after Giuliani, in the wake of Romney’s attack, declared in South Carolina: “I promise you, we can end illegal immigration.”

Giuliani explained the apparent contradiction by saying that advances in technology had created methods of fighting illegal immigration not available in 1996.

“People that come in illegally, we’ve got to stop,” Giuliani said in a recent radio ad. “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.”

Asked in a recent debate about his New York policies protecting illegal immigrants, Giuliani said they were a “sensible” response to a federal failure to secure borders and to deport even the illegal immigrants in jail for crimes.

“I had 400,000 illegal immigrants,” he said. “The best year they ever had for deportations was 2,000. So I figured out I was stuck with 398,000.”

Some advocates for immigrants are concerned about the apparent toughening of his approach to illegal immigration.

Some conservatives want Giuliani to do even more to distance himself from his record as mayor, pointing to Romney’s repudiation of his past support for abortion rights as a model.

“Romney has made a good case for having changed his thinking on abortion,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which favors limits on immigration. “Giuliani could make the same case on immigration, but that is not what he is doing. He has a record he needs to overcome.”

Randy Mastro, a deputy mayor under Giuliani, says Giuliani’s views have been consistent: Both his call for stricter border control and his treatment of illegal immigrants reflect his overarching concern for public safety.

Still, people who see a marked shift in tone and emphasis wonder which stance Giuliani would bring to the Oval Office.

“How would he be as president? It’s really hard to tell,” said Marshall Fitz, advocacy director for the American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

“That’s the danger of flip-flopping: You lose your compass.”

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janet.hook@latimes.com

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In Giuliani’s words

1994

‘Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in [New York] are undocumented aliens. . . . 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.’

2000

‘There isn’t a mayor or public official in this country that’s more strongly pro-immigrant than I am.’

2007

‘People that come in illegally, we’ve got to stop. You stop illegal immigration by building a fence -- a physical fence and then a technological fence.’