Rudy Giuliani's campaign just announced that it is releasing two radio ads in South Carolina today. The first ad consists of a straightforward listing of the former mayor's accomplishments in New York (cutting crime and welfare rolls) and an optimistic take on what he could do as President ("My focus when I ran for Mayor of New York City was on the future, and it will be in this campaign. Leadership is about what we can do, what we can accomplish, never taking “No” for an answer," Giuliani says.)
But in a second ad about immigration, entitled "Fence," Giuliani seeks to distance himself from his very pro-immigration record in New York, where he ordered, as the New Yorker put it this week, "city employees—including cops—not to coöperate with federal I.N.S. agents looking for illegal aliens."
Here's what Giuliani says in the new ad.
Mayor Giuliani: “It frustrates me that if someone comes here illegally, in addition to everything else that’s involved in that, if they commit a crime, we don’t throw them out of the country. As the mayor of New York I wanted to see if I could get the Immigration Service to help me. Let’s see if you could get rid of the drug dealers who are coming out of jail. It makes no sense – after they have been in jail for selling drugs in the United States – we now have to keep them in the United States. They couldn’t do it because they had other people lined up to throw out. They had like a professor who over-stayed his visa. I had a drug dealer who had maybe killed people. A person who comes here illegally and commits a crime should be thrown out of the country. People that come in illegally we gotta stop. You stop illegal immigration by building a fence, a physical fence and then a technological fence. You then hire enough Border Patrol so they can respond in a timely way. And then, if anybody becomes a citizen, we should make certain that they can read English, write English and speak English, because this is an English speaking country.”
