Immigration Chronicles

Blogging the issue with the Chronicle staff

Giuliani’s plan for illegal immigration


Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani appears to have his immigration stump speech down. On the campaign trail today in Maine, he spoke again about how to curb illegal immigration. According to an AP story:

To stem the tide of illegal immigrants, Giuliani said border patrol officials should use technology — such as nighttime photography and motion detectors along border fences — and statistical analysis of where illegal entry takes place.

To keep better track of immigrants who enter the nation legally, the government should issue tamperproof ID cards, he said.

“If you had all this data and information and used this equipment, we could virtually eliminate illegal immigration,” he said.

Notice a glaring omission there? What about the 12 million illegal immigrants who are already here? No easy answer to that one – especially politically.

As we wrote recently, ICE estimates that it’ll cost $94 billion to deport the nation’s illegal immigrants. And that figure doesn’t even include court costs and the price to round up all these people. So that option seems highly unlikely.

You could try to enforce an enivronment where illegal immigrants don’t feel welcome with the theory that they’ll leave the U.S. Fine landlords who rent to them and employers who hire them, for example. But Rudy was mayor of a city known for providing haven for millions of undocumented workers. So that option might expose him to criticisms of hypocrisy.

Categories: General
Mizanur Rahman

11 Responses

  1. Joyce says:

    With the money saved on ending free education, free school lunches, free medical care, the drop in ID & Social Security theft, the cost of imprisoning gang members, etc., etc…. We would probably break even!

  2. Mike C. says:



  3. Tracey says:

    It’s true, any effort we make at limiting immigration will cost money. I found an interesting plan that has a lot of validity at It would take a lot of fence to accomplish his goals…

  4. Jeff says:

    The greatest difficulty a candidate faces in honestly dealing with illegal immigration is a media that is overwhelmingly biased. We see it again here. Rounding up and deporting all 12 million (or whatever number there is) illegal immigrants ought rightly to be taught in our school as a classic example what a “straw man” argument is. Certainly Mizanur Rahman knows this. I’d like him tell us who of importance in the immigration debate is advocating for this. Anyone who bothers to look will find is that this is an argument created by the amnesty crowd.

    We should certainly do some deportation. As the late Barbara Jordan, Chair of U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform said, “deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.” But it doesn’t have to be mass deportation to have an effect on the problem. Doing a reasonable amount would produce a fear that people breaking the law ought to feel. And it also needs to be among the many things necessary to reverse the existing reward structure that illegal immigrants experience by being in the country illegally. As has been acknowledged for years, access to employment tops the list. But you can and should apply it to many things, sending a consistent message that it isn’t acceptable to be in the country without permission. More importantly, a policy like that intended to change the existing incentives for coming and being in the country illegally deals not just with illegal immigrants currently here but sets up the only system where future illegal immigration can be controlled.

    What we should give illegal immigrants is transportation out of the country and enough money to get back home in exchange for a promise that they won’t renter outside the law and an admission the would create additional consequences to breaking that promise. Those who do leave voluntarily should be able to come back under any legal program without preferences or penalties. Those who are deported should be banned from admission for life.

  5. Joe says:

    The immigration debate is ridiculous. We let them come in without proper processing so U.S companies can have a bigger profit margin. We turn the other way when we want cheap labor and cheap produce. Now all of a sudden the government and corporations that did nothing about this issue all of a sudden want to back peddle years of negligence and enforcement of immigration law. I’m appalled at how ignorant “we” Americans have become and how suprisingly afraid we are of non-Americans. Most of these people came to this country to work and most have family and friends here. Its upsetting at least to me how we seem to blame our problems on a “group” of people that for the most part do not deserve our backlash.

  6. newshound-1 says:



    Complete and total balderdash. Another reason as a conservative/Republican I would never even consider voting for Giuliani.

    Illegal immigration costs the federal government alone over $10 BILLION a year–which doesn’t even count the costs to state and local governments. Each individual illegal alien family costs taxpayers over $2,500 per year.

    The cost? of enforcing the law? What does it cost? each year to enforce the laws against bank robbery or kidnapping? Maybe we shouldn’t enforce those laws because it costs money.

    And the figure used is absurd. In 1953 President Dwight David Eisenhower enforced the law and in less then a year over 3 million illegal aliens went home and the borders remained secure for over 10 years. What did that cost? Very, very little because Eisenhower did it correctly.

    Rudy Giuliani like almost all of our politicians today is NO Eisenhower.

  7. Robert Nagle says:

    Jeff, the problem with that approach is that you’d have to crack down on people who overstay tourist and business visas. That would be very hard. So far I haven’t seen any good solution for that.

  8. Steve says:

    If the US were to actually make a reasonable effort at enforcing the law on employers, employment for these illegal aliens would dry up and most of the 12M+ would leave on their own without needing to be deported.

  9. Jeff says:

    Robert- What’s wrong with cracking down on visa violators? The US VISIT program was supposed to track these people. It’s reported that 40% of the illegal immigrants in the country came in legally. I think we ought to consider requiring bonding of visitors. Either their government or private parties could provide the bonds, which would rise depending on the rate of violations from a country. That would create a source of funds for enforcement too.

  10. Govchance says:

    Cut the jobs by fining the heck out of employers that hire illegals, as in zero tolerance. At that point there would be no reason for them to stay.The country would be a much better place.


  11. liz says:

    They forgot to add an extra 1 billion or so to support a professional cheerleading squad for our “boys in blue” (I.C.E.)..

    If we eliminated all the mafia politicians salaries and porkbarrel coming out of Congress I think most Americans would support a 10 year I.C.E. dictatorship then the 94 billion would be defrayed by the spilled milk that was intentionally spilt and crafted by the BUSH-FOX-CALDERON oligarchy.