Giuliani talks Minutemen, Iraq in Anaheim visit [wants to 'expand legal immigration']

Q. One thing I haven't heard you talk about is the Minuteman civil border patrol project, which has a strong base in Orange County. What do you think of these activities?

You wouldn't need any of that if the government would do what it's supposed to do, which is to end illegal immigration.

A. If they want to organize themselves in way to lawfully deal with illegal immigration, they have a right to do that. If they're going to start doing unlawful things, then you've got to stop them. You can't just, in the abstract, say it's right or wrong. …

I understand why we have to end illegal immigration. We can do it with a physical fence, a high-tech fence, border patrol deployed in the right way, a Border Stat program (to evaluate where and when illegal crossings occur), a tamperproof ID card.

And then, let's expand legal immigration, which we need. We're almost at full employment. Our unemployment rates are down very, very low. We literally need more people in this country. Our birthrate is low. So, there's nothing wrong with encouraging legal immigration.

Though the overall Kennedy-McCain bill was of course horrible, some of its components were at least somewhat admirable.

I give Senator Kyl credit for getting what I believe he considered to be a genuine end to chain migration, and a move towards a merit-based point system. The problem, of course, was that it would not have gone into effect for eight years, and during that eight yr period chain migration would actually have been greatly increased to ‘clear the backlog.’ I guess Kyl has more faith in his fellow members of Congress, but I never believed that the transition would take place after the eight years, especially if the Dems were to have the Presidency and Congress, or if there were a Bush-like Republican president and a Dem Congress. Why would the Dems allow an end to a system guaranteed to mint them millions of new voters in exchange for something with at least some uncertainty? Again, I believe they’d still win with a large-scale point system, but the margin would probably not be as great. So at most, I could have seen the Dems allowing more skills-based immigration, but only in addition to massive chain migration, not in place of it.

I also heard that the defeated bill would have ended the Diversity Visa Lottery, but I never could pin that down one way or another. Still, it was a shame that the provisions dealing with legal immigration, and unending chain migration specifically, did not get more attention. They did represent improvement over the 2006 version of the amnesty bill, but unfortunately all of the improvements were really promises for action years down the road. This points to another problem with trying to do everything with one bill. They should construct a real reform to legal immigration that takes place either immediately, or in the very near future, and not tie it to amnesty. And if some amnesty is the price to be paid, then the end to chain migration should be immediate.

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