The reason there's more concern NOW is that there wasn't ANY back in 1996. We're paying for the sins of the past and some of these guys, Rudy included with Dubya, still don't get it.
Past performance is the ONLY true indicator of future performance.
Actually there was a lot of concern in 1996 about lllegal immigration and some were trying to address it. But the very same big money masters that destroyed that effort are the same ones pushing open borders today.
Stephen Moore, founder of the Club for Growth, has written articles in favor of increased immigration to the U.S., and has debated against immigration restrictionists. In one article, Moore favorably cited a speech at Cato by Rep. Dick Armey, R-TX, who said he believes the U.S. "should be thinking about increasing legal immigration." Moore worked on studies for the wing immigration advocacy group, the National Immigration Forum, which favors amnesty for illegal aliens.
In 1996, Moore along with Grover Norquist helped defeat any measures aimed at enforcement in an immigration reform bill.
Marcus Stern describes Moores involvement in an award winning article.
The coalition was a juggernaut that fought virtually any verification initiative. Because Republicans control Congress, conservative lobbyists were especially influential. The fact that some limited, voluntary verification projects stayed in the bill at all outraged some conservatives.
"I view it as the camel's nose under the tent for a national ID card," said Stephen Moore, an economist with the Cato Institute who lobbied against the bill. "The theme we played to Republicans was that if you're trying to roll back big government, you shouldn't be instituting this new police-state power."
Social conservatives like Norquist and libertarians like Moore don't see illegal immigration as a major problem.
"Illegal immigration is part of the price we pay for being both a prosperous and a free country, and I'm not willing to sacrifice some of our freedoms to try to keep out immigrants, especially when I don't think it's going to work very well," said Moore.
He added that spending $3 billion-plus a year to fund the Immigration and Naturalization Service "probably is a waste of money. But this is a political issue. And the way you deal with illegal immigration is you increase the INS budget. It doesn't do a lot, but at least politicians on both sides can go home and say, `Well, how can you say I'm not doing anything about immigration? I increased the INS budget.' "
What you don't do, he said, is involve employers in enforcement.
"Sometimes in politics you pass feel-good measures," Moore said. "And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Passing a bill that's mostly window dressing is a way of defusing public alarm about something. And in states like California, illegal immigration is perceived as a big problem."
Working closely with Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, Cesar Conda (former domestic advisor to Dick Cheney) circulated a statement against Prop. 187 of California in the nineties.
And what have Moore and his associate Grover Norquist been up to lately? More of the same.
Last fall the Club for Growth worked against conservative republican candidates by funding their opposition.
Moore, along with Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tamar Jacoby and other amnesty advocates penned a letter to the Wall St Journal proclaiming Bush’s guest worker plan as "a humane, orderly, and economically sensible approach to migration."
On September 19, 2005, the Federal Election Commission filed suit against the Club for Growth for violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act for failing to register as a political action committee in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 congressional elections.
You can be sure that both Stephen Moore and Grover Norquist are working full time to keep our borders open and promote any and all trade/labor agreements whether they benefit the USA and it’s people or not.
Moore said this about Norquist. "From the moment he gets up to the moment he gets to bed, he thinks, 'How am I going to hurt the other team?"
Whoever the Club for Growth decides to push for president, you can be sure they don't believe it if that candidate pretends to want to secure the border and implement sane trade policy.
http://towncriernews.blogspot.com/2007/02/club-for-growth-and-2008-presidential.html