What Can Brown Do For Giuliani?

As Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani had a very pro-immigrant stance. Of course, now that he is running for the GOP nomination, he's going all Tancredo on us. As Bill Maher pointed out, immigrant bashing has surpassed gay bashing among Republicans. "Brown is the new pink," he said, and Giuliani seems to be on board.

A week after being assailed by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for being soft on illegal immigration as mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani today unveiled the details of his plan to solve the United States' immigration problem. His campaign is aggressively pushing back on Romney's attack to paint their GOP rival as a hypocrite on this issue.

"We can end illegal immigration," Giuliani vowed to an audience of roughly 300 at a community center in Aiken, S.C., Tuesday morning. "I promise you, we can end illegal immigration."

Listed as one of his "12 commitments" to the American people, Giuliani promised to secure the borders and identify every noncitizen in the United States, noting the more than 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

"That's a lot of people to walk over your border without being identified," he said.

The two-term mayor proposed requiring the deportation of any illegal immigrant who commits a felony, building both a physical and a high-tech border fence, deploying a larger and better-trained border patrol, implementing a tamperproof identity card for all foreign workers and students with a single national database of noncitizens to track their status.

The problem for the Mayor is that this new tough stance doesn't resemble his actual record on the subject.

"It sounds like an effort by Giuliani to make himself seem like a hawk on immigration when, in fact, he's been a dove all along," the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, Mark Krikorian, said.

(snip)

The director of the Manhattan-based Center for an Urban Future, Jonathan Bowles, said Mr. Giuliani seems to have forgotten the "positive impact that immigrants, both legal and illegal, have had on New York and other cities."

He pointed out that Mr. Giuliani created the mayor's office of immigrant affairs when he was in City Hall and filed suit against the federal government for attempting to allow city employees to turn in illegal immigrants who came forward for city services

It's going to be tough for Giuliani to hide his record on this subject. Luckily for him, they guy attacking him on this issue, Mitt-flop Romney, has some similar problems with his record.