There is much to like and admire about Rudy Giuliani —
particularly as it relates to his tenure as mayor of New York City.
In his recent address to the Conservative Political Action
Conference, Giuliani pointed to some of his prominent successes as
mayor, including sharp reductions in crime and substantial declines
in the welfare rolls. He touched only lightly on his extraordinary
leadership following September 11, but offered a powerful, ringing
defense of President Bush’s efforts to go on the offensive against
Islamist terrorists, likening his approach to President Truman’s
efforts to challenge communist aggression after World War II.
Unfortunately, however, Giuliani did not address one issue that
has the potential to seriously damage his efforts to win
conservative support: his prior defense of “sanctuary” laws, which
act as a shield for illegal immigrants. These laws, which are in
effect in locations such as New York, Los Angeles, San Diego,
Houston, Miami and Austin and Montgomery County, Md., bar police
from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.
Open-borders advocates contend that the prohibitions constitute
sound public policy because illegal immigrants are often the
victims of serious crimes including domestic violence and robbery,
and that allowing local police to report immigration violations to
federal authorities would make them reluctant to cooperate with
police and prosecutors in such cases.
Several responses are in order. The criminal code is filled with
laws against relatively “minor” crimes — writing bad checks, pick
pocketing, petty theft, burglary, vandalizing someone’s car, etc.
If we were to prosecute everyone arrested for these crimes to the
fullest and demand the maximum penalty every time, the legal system
would grind to a halt and police would lose the ability to obtain
information from small-time criminals that is absolutely essential
to solving more serious crimes. So, we very sensibly grant police
and prosecutors wide-ranging discretion in prosecuting relatively
“minor” offenses. What we don’t do is guarantee the perpetrators
immunity from prosecution.
But that’s what sanctuary laws like the one Mr. Giuliani
supported in New York City effectively do. Even though these laws
typically contain some reasonable-sounding language that would
appear to allow the police to exercise commonsense discretion in
deciding whether to work with immigration authorities, in practice
such cooperation is so restricted that in some cases police have
been unable to arrest gang members they know to be illegal aliens
with prior criminal convictions unless they witness them committing
new crimes.
ACCORDING TO HEATHER MAC DONALD of the Manhattan Institute, who
closely tracks the issue of illegals and criminal activity,
big-city police departments are deeply divided between police
chiefs and senior officials who defend sanctuary policies and
rank-and-file officers who believe that such policies deprive them
of a critical law-enforcement tool — the ability to work closely
with immigration authorities to apprehend some of the most violent,
dangerous criminal offenders — persons who are in the United
States illegally. Immigration policies “have harmed New York,” Mac
Donald wrote in a Winter 2004 article in City Journal
titled “The Illegal Alien Crime Wave.” She added:
Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to
the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a
1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their
employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah, said Giuliani,
just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be
grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize innocent people.” Though
he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5,
2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York
could still require that its employees keep immigration information
confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government.
Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most
devastating attack on the city and the country in
history.
The issue came up again after a gang of Mexicans (four of them in
the United States illegally) kidnapped and raped a 42-year-old
mother of two in Queens on December 19, 2002. She was brutally
assaulted before being rescued by a New York City Police Department
canine unit. The NYPD had previously arrested three of the illegals
for crimes such as assault and armed robbery. But it had failed to
notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Responding to an angry public outcry, Giuliani’s successor as
mayor, Michael Bloomberg, made minor changes in the policy, only to
reverse himself and make the policy even weaker after Hispanic
activists complained that Bloomberg’s changes endangered civil
liberties.
And that’s the crux of the problem. In most of America’s major
urban centers, these open-borders activists constitute a powerful
voting bloc that politicians are loath to take on — as are the
police commissioners that they appoint. What results in city after
city is permanent paralysis, as the police become so hogtied by the
liberal politicians and Latino activists that come up with idiotic
policies that endanger public safety.
PERHAPS NO CITY HAS BEEN more damaged by sanctuary-policy
foolishness than Los Angeles, where a generation of politicians and
police chiefs have been cowed by the illegal-alien lobby. In 1979,
then-police chief Daryl Gates enacted something called Special
Order 40, which bars police officers from asking someone they
arrest about his immigration status before filing criminal charges;
only after charging someone with a felony or multiple misdemeanors
can police ask about immigration status. What results from these
procedures, Los Angeles Police Department officers told Mac Donald,
is that they frequently see gang members, whom they know to be
previously deported felons, on the streets of L.A. after illegally
re-entering the country. The police were (and still are) told they
cannot arrest these criminals unless they put them under
surveillance (a logistical impossibility when you have an already
overstretched police force). What resulted was a city in which up
to two-thirds of the fugitive warrants in Los Angeles in 2004 were
for illegals, while 95 percent of all outstanding murder warrants
were for illegals.
Giuliani isn’t being asked too many questions about sanctuary
policies, but he should be. For one thing, they would appear to
directly contradict his approach to crime which worked so
successfully when he was mayor of New York City: the idea that
vigorous prosecution of relatively minor crimes improves the
overall quality of life for the law-abiding majority and enhances
the ability of law enforcement to pressure small-time offenders for
cooperation in bringing the most dangerous, violent criminals to
justice.
Indeed, people who have worked with Giuliani say he hasn’t
always been soft on the question of illegal immigration. Michael
Cutler, a former INS agent, recounts a meeting sometime in the
early 1980s in Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’s office, during which Cutler
led a group of immigration officers protesting what they said were
insufficient criminal penalties for serial violators of federal
immigration law. When he heard their concerns, D’Amato became angry
and telephoned Giuliani, then U.S. attorney in New York, on his
speaker phone. As Cutler and his fellow agents listened intently,
Giuliani researched the relevant statute of the federal code, and
then made it clear in no uncertain terms that he agreed: the
penalties needed to be strengthened.
The relevant question today is this: Would President Giuliani
govern like the tough-minded U.S. attorney who agreed with the
border agents that day in D’Amato’s office, or like the mayor who
lobbied tenaciously to defend sanctuary policies? It’s a pretty
safe bet that the great majority of people who applauded him at
CPAC would prefer the former — and for good reason.
