Right up to 9/11, Giuliani fought a l’outrance to keep NYC safe for illegals

A reader writes:

The ABC News article you cite on Giuliani and illegals also says this:

In 1996, Giuliani compared “the anti-immigration issue that’s now sweeping the country” to “the Chinese Exclusionary Act, or the Know-Nothing movement—these were movements that encouraged Americans to fear foreigners, to fear something that is different and to stop immigration.”

Some nice name-calling there.

The article also says that he asked Feds to issue new guidelines that would encourage city employees to turn in illegals. That’s not my understanding. I think that’s a mistake in the reporting. In 2001, just before 9/11, he was announcing that he intended to defy a federal order that would protect city employees who reported illegals.

I wrote this to you a couple of times. Heather Mac Donald mentioned it in an article. Here’s the relevant paragraph:

Immigration politics have similarly harmed New York. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize people.” Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government. Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most devastating attack on the city and the country in history.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 10, 2007 12:00 PM | Send