Rudy and Immigration
by Ryan Sager
Wed, 20 Jun 2007 at 4:19 PM
updated Wed, 20 Jun 2007 at 4:27 PM
Ramesh makes an excellent point about Rudy and immigration. (It's first-name day here at LP!)
Basically, he (Rudy) has managed to be adamantly opposed to the McCain-Kennedy-Bush-Dobbs (no, sorry, not Dobbs) immigration bill, without drawing attention to the fact that he is extremely pro-immigrant (he was mayor of New York City, for chrissake) and probably even pretty darn pro-legalization.
(How's that for use of parentheses?)
Or, as Ramesh put it:
He could have flip-flopped: But he does not want to get the same reputation as Romney. And he may want to leave open the possibility of pushing for an amnesty as president. Embracing the Senate bill, on the other hand, would have damaged his campaign both by undermining his tough-guy credentials and annoying conservatives.
So he came up with a somewhat technical reason for opposing the bill—he wants better databases. There was no flip-flop. Giuliani has a track record of wanting data on people, after all. But neither did he get associated with an unpopular bill. In the presidential field, all of the conservative outrage at the bill has been directed at John McCain. At the moment, you'd have to say that immigration is helping Giuliani—just because it has caused McCain to tank—even though his position is out of line with most Republican primary voters. That's a neat trick.
Now, I'm not sure this database idea is practical. But it does answer the national security question without at the same time being overly punitive to Mexican immigrants. Of course, if the Lou Dobbs crowd understood this, that's exactly why they'd oppose it.
Related Topics: GOP Primary, Immigration
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