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Feb. 3, 2021 - Rudy Giuliani
35:32
This CANNOT BE LAWFULLY DONE By Executive Order: Immigration Reform | Rudy Giuliani | Ep. 108
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Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani with Rudy's Common Sense.
Today's episode, we'll discuss immigration.
Subject we haven't talked about in quite some time, but a subject that is a perennial, isn't it, of American policy, a subject that we haven't really solved as a nation, if you haven't solved it or at least approached well as a nation, and one that is one of the major issues facing us in so many different ways.
There's an opportunity to do something about it now, and let's talk about it, and let's see what the opportunity is and how it can be done.
I don't want to offer great hope, but I don't want to also say, you know, dead on arrival, because there are ways of doing this.
And a Joe Biden Joe Biden of like 20 years ago probably would have been a good bet to get this done.
Because I'm thinking of, it's a little further back, but I'm thinking of the crime bill that he helped to negotiate.
It took about seven years for him and Schumer and a group of other people, including me, to get that done under Clinton.
This is a similar, although I will say a more difficult subject.
So let's start talking about immigration and let's put it in context because I expect we're going to be spending a lot of the next year with a lot of battles about this.
And that may turn out to be fruitful or not.
There's no question an announced core of the Biden program is immigration reform.
Now, everybody's in favor of immigration reform.
The question now becomes, how do you define immigration reform?
So Biden himself, as far as I can tell, has not given like a major speech on immigration in which he's laid out, these are my five points or these are my 10 points, the way some other presidents and legislative leaders have done in the past.
But his party has made many, many pronouncements about what they want, particularly from what we would call the left wing of his party.
He's embraced some of those.
He hasn't embraced all of them, I don't think, but he's embraced a lot of them.
He even has incorporated some of them in his executive orders, and whether those are legal or not or constitutional or not is going to have to be tested.
But in any event, it does show at least some of his thinking, whether that's his Hard and fast position or his negotiating position is another matter and probably is going to be the answer to whether or not we ever get this done.
So let's take a look at what is involved in it.
First of all, he's in a perfect situation.
He's got control of both houses of Congress.
So normally he should get what he wants.
However, so did his predecessors have that, right?
Donald Trump had that first two years.
Bush had that.
Obama had that.
And the only person who actually got immigration reform done was Ronald Reagan with a split Congress.
So I don't know if it's good luck or bad luck to have control.
Despite that, however, this isn't a matter of luck.
It's a matter of, will you negotiate?
Number one, maybe yes, maybe no.
And if you do negotiate, how good are you going to be at it?
So let's look at the history of this.
The last real reform I think most people remember, worth reviewing, is the Simpson-Mazzoli bill that passed in late 1986.
It's called officially the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, or IRCA.
I worked on that a good deal.
I know it really well.
I was Associate Attorney General and U.S.
Attorney when that was passed.
But, you know, like most bills, it started getting written In the early 80s, by the time it passed and went through the Simpson-Mazzoli hearings, it took quite some time.
Here's what the bill did, and it's part of the problem and part of the solution, I guess.
It gave amnesty to illegal immigrants who fit a certain category.
Obviously, not committing a crime, not having a bad record.
I'm not sure if they had to work or were willing to work.
Don't remember all the categories, but there were a substantial number of categories.
A couple of million or more became legalized under that program.
Don't think all six million.
There were a certain number, I remember, reluctant to even go under the program because they didn't trust the government.
They thought, you know, this was like a ruse to catch them and then they'd be thrown out, even though Very few people get thrown out, or very few people used to get thrown out.
The amnesty gave them a path to citizenship.
That was fairly rigorous, but not impossible.
And of course, that's what the Democrats wanted.
A lot of other things to help immigrants as well.
But the key thing was, they called it regularizing the situation for people who came here illegally, but acted legally while they were here.
People who came Avoiding the law saying you have to come in and identify yourself.
But other than that, their reasons were the same reasons that people come in legally.
They just skip the line.
And the argument was, why leave them in a state where their outcasts in society were not going to be able to deport 6 million, 7 million, 8 million people?
Let's find a more sensible solution.
And the Republicans bought that, but they bought it with a promise by the Democrats that this will never happen again. We will substantially
increase border enforcement.
They came up with a lot of plans. And therefore, we will not have a repeat of this because the
Republican objection was, you know, if you give them this amnesty thing, my goodness,
the whole world will come here. And as opposed to people lining up, coming in the way that
normally people came through the system where you have to sign up and wait your turn and then get
online for citizenship and therefore over a period of time prove.
prove your adherence to the law and your real desire to be an American because you love America.
Well, the simple fact is most people would conclude that the bill didn't work,
either on both sides.
On the left, the let-everybody-come-inside, let's call it that, they felt that it affected too few people.
Too few people took advantage of it.
It didn't have any kind of broad acceptance, although a lot of people did benefit by it.
It's a question of, I guess, your perspective.
And then on the right, the feeling was that there was no real increase in enforcement that meant anything.
Illegal immigration just continued, and by the time we get 10-12 years later, the original estimate of 5-6 million goes up to 12 million.
And now it could be 20, it could be 12.
I'm not an expert on exactly the number.
I knew it much better when I was a U.S.
attorney in the Southern District of New York while this was going on.
So I lived during the period of time this bill was passed and the aftermath of it.
There's no question it increased illegal immigration because of that amnesty provision, even though it was described as a one-time amnesty.
In 1990, a little slightly different part of the immigration law, under Bush, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, and it modified the Nationality Act of 1965, and it did a couple of things I don't know if you can just make a simple evaluation, it worked or didn't work.
It changed things.
It limited visas to 700,000.
That included aliens, aliens with extraordinary skills, skilled workers, religious workers, investors, as well as family members, and it emphasized diversity.
In some ways it made immigration easier.
Whatever it did, it increased the foreign-born population dramatically, because in that decade, between 90 and 2000, the foreign-born population of the United States went from 7.9% to 11.1%.
That's a very large growth.
But these are people who came in legally.
Foreign-born became in legally.
What you had happening on the illegal side, however, was A real, real increase in illegal immigration and very spotty enforcement.
Periods where during Bush, during Clinton, even during Obama, there was an attempt and a good faith attempt at times to really cut down on illegal immigration, but then long periods of time when they gave up.
And this whole concept of sanctuary cities, which back in the 80s was a minor thing having to do with priority for people who were criminals, all of a sudden it became a big, broad thing.
Cities were places you could come and you could stay there forever, even if you were illegal.
And cities started to almost advertise themselves as sanctuary cities, despite the fact that that was in complete defiance of federal law.
That, of course, increased the amount of illegal immigration aliens greatly.
No longer was there this fear that you were going to get caught and And, you know, the word in the illegal immigrant community, both here and on the other side, spreads pretty quickly.
And then you would have another debate about the murders and the crimes that take place.
Why don't we take a short pause?
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So the debate is, there's no question that illegal aliens commit crimes.
The question is, do they commit crimes in greater proportion than citizens, American citizens?
The answer to that is mostly probably not.
Certainly the era that I know the best, when I was U.S.
attorney and mayor of New York and had a turnaround crime in New York, And I think I can say without any kind of fear that you can think I'm bragging, I did a better job of that than anyone has ever done.
Illegal immigrants, illegal aliens were not my main problem.
The illegal people were my main problem.
That doesn't mean they weren't a problem.
This is where you can overstate.
There's no question there were some really bad ones.
But the core problem were the things we were doing to ourselves.
What I would have liked in those days...
is for the immigration service to focus on the criminals among those illegal immigrants and deport them.
And the immigration service was so disorganized that it treated the illegal immigrant who was working in a restaurant the same way as the murderer or the drug dealer.
Very hard, unless you had tremendous influence, and at times I did, to get their internal, sometimes inscrutable priorities Fixed.
So, three presidents tried to fix it.
Bush, right after he won re-election, offered a reform.
Came close.
Don't remember the exact details of it now, but it was roughly a path to citizenship, a regularization in return for more enforcement.
And I would say, if I recall correctly, it failed because the Republicans didn't trust that the enforcement would take place.
They felt the same thing was going to happen to them that happened to them under Reagan, who after all was as conservative as you get, but at the same time they feel they were double-crossed in that the Democrats got all these millions, got amnesty, they didn't get border enforcement.
Obama promised when he ran that he was going to do it.
He had his opportunity between 2009 and 2012 when he had both houses of Congress I don't know that he ever really proposed a serious bill.
His concept was pretty much the same as Bush.
Less enforcement.
Maybe not.
Maybe it's about the same level of enforcement.
There were times in which his actual enforcement was stronger than in prior years, but it was spotty.
Certain periods of time, there'd be very strict enforcement.
He did a lot of deportations.
But there was no systemic solution presented for illegal immigration.
So the Republicans who felt they were schnookered the first time said, you want us to regularize, legalize another 5, 10 million You're going to tell us we're going to do enforcement, but you're not doing anything different.
Sure, you make an arrest, but that's not the answer.
There's got to be a systemic answer so we don't keep repeating this problem, repeating it and repeating it.
So the Republicans, I think, probably discouraged the Obama-Biden administration from anything serious.
And then when you get beyond 2013 and the Republicans won the House back, It kind of went to naught.
Trump made a really hard try for it, and it looked for a while like it would work.
Trump offered—and Trump's window was, oh, about 2017 to 2018.
And his central framework of his, which is debatable, everybody has their own version, was he was going to replace DACA, and he would agree to a road for citizenship for 1.8 million illegals.
He would reduce family immigration, abolish the lottery system, and increase legal immigration, having to do with merit.
That didn't seem to bother the Democrats too much, and maybe there was room for negotiation there.
But here's the thing that he wanted and the Republicans now insisted on, and that was the border wall.
And why do they want a border wall?
Because promising more illegal or more enforcement against the illegals is easy to do and hard to accomplish.
There were suggestions at times, I believe Senator Graham may have suggested others, that we should do the enforcement first.
And then after two years of showing that we can control the border, we would be far more likely to be generous in terms of allowing people to have a pass for citizenship, because we would know this is going to constantly replicate itself.
That never went anywhere.
And I think the wall caught on because it was a way to do something concrete that would happen at the same time that you kind of opened up the path to citizenship for people, which would tend to want to bring a lot more people here.
And it seemed like a pretty good suggestion by Trump because the wall had been recommended at times by Schumer, Pelosi, Biden, I don't remember if Obama ever did, but they certainly were on record as supporting a wall.
So when Trump, when Trump suggested, I don't think he thought he was suggesting something novel.
I think he thought he found something from their playbook or that they're willing to accept that his Republican, Republicans were worried about getting schnookered again and not having any kind of enforcement mechanism would buy into.
But here's what happened.
That got evaluated on a new test, not so much just immigration itself.
It's the don't-give-Trump-any-victories approach of Pelosi, particularly Ann Schumer.
So that's where we are.
We've done nothing on immigration reform that is systemic since 86.
The general view is that 86 didn't work, and therefore on both sides something different has to be done.
So now Biden's in charge.
He's got the House, he's got the Senate, he's got the presidency.
What can we put together of what he would do based on what both he and his party have said?
Well, they're in favor of open borders.
Whatever that means.
I'm pretty sure he agreed to that.
Hasn't really given a big speech on it, but both Warren and Bernie were very big on open borders, and some of the others just kept out-promising themselves about open borders.
Was there a time, you might remember better than I do, when they all raised their hands in favor of open borders?
I don't know what that means.
That means you just walk in, no matter who you are.
We don't even take your name.
I think it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of.
It would be like leaving the door of your house open and anybody could come in and you really wouldn't care who they were or what they wanted or... They can't really mean that.
We'll be back shortly.
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So now let's go on with this analysis of immigration.
Second, They wanted to end the Trump travel ban, which they said was a Muslim travel ban.
Of course, it wasn't.
Some of the countries included were not Muslim.
Some of the countries included had mixed populations.
And it wasn't based on Muslims.
It was based on countries that had high degrees of terrorism.
And they were, in fact, the countries were selected from the ones that had the most terrorism.
And it wasn't a ban.
It was make it more difficult for them to come in.
A highly sensible program.
That I had something to do with both proposing and fixing so that it wouldn't be in any way illegal, and it wasn't found to be illegal.
It was a rather sensible thing to do.
Some countries are more dangerous than others.
Some countries support terrorism all over the world, like Iran.
Well, you've got to treat Iran different than Great Britain, or are you stupid?
Or don't care about security.
But they were against the ban.
Although they did away with it in the executive order, and now they have their own ban for countries that have too much, I call it CCP virus, Chinese Communist Party virus.
They call it COVID.
They have at various times said they want to extend the stimulus to illegals.
They passed an executive order already that includes illegals in the census.
Which means that people who aren't citizens will have something to do with determining the number of members of Congress we have.
So if you have a district with a lot of illegal immigrants, you might end up with another one or two districts in your state.
Say a state like Arizona, New Mexico, California, Florida, whatever the states are that have large numbers of illegals.
That, of course, is part of moving them along the road to voting, to voting openly.
Look, they vote anyway.
Anyone who tells you they don't vote never was in Arizona or Florida or the time voting takes place.
And with the fact that they now get driver's licenses, it's easy for them to vote.
But it's one thing to illegally vote, And then it's another thing to say, vote, because then you'll get a lot more people voting.
But they're not citizens.
I mean, I don't know if that's even constitutional.
That people who came in here illegally can vote.
It's not legal that people who come in here legally can vote.
If you and I travel to London and decide to live there for two years, they're not going to let us vote.
Unless we become citizens of Great Britain.
What kind of stupid thing is that?
They want to protect sanctuary cities, which means they want us, they want the United States government to say that states can violate federal law.
They can pass laws about what's legal and illegal, but if a city says, we don't like those laws, they can do whatever the heck they want.
You know, so we're going to end up with lots of Portland's and that Chazz kind of thing that we had, which you extend that too much and you're talking about anarchy.
They want to make a pretty easy path to citizenship for illegals, and they want to do away with ICE, which is the new enforcement arm to enforce illegal immigration, which also turns out to be quite effective in dealing with, as you would imagine, human trafficking, particularly of innocent young children, and does a good job with drugs, because illegal immigration is really a very, very useful process to take advantage of for gangs, for criminals, for people who engage in human trafficking.
And I'll explain that in a minute.
The reality is, this is a very, very ambitious program.
This is both things that Biden has said and things that you can pull from the things that some of his supporters have said.
And it's not the most radical left-wing stuff.
It's the stuff that pretty much is repeated over and over again, including healthcare for illegals, I believe is in their platform.
I don't know if voting for illegals is in their platform, but I mean, they're sure headed toward that.
And they turn their back when it happens anyway.
Now, Biden ran on the theme of unity.
So here's a great example.
Here's a great example.
Was he telling the truth or wasn't he?
And will he be a president of any consequence or not?
Because presidents of consequence have to do things.
They have to accomplish things.
If what he does is pass a totally partisan bill, That does the things I just mentioned.
It'll be a worse disaster than Obamacare was for Obama, because it will create a very difficult and dangerous situation.
And it'll take a situation that's very dangerous already, and you'll see really, really terrible consequences.
And let's get realistic about illegal immigration.
Knock out both sides of it, right?
The right wants to tell you that the illegal—well, some on the right want to tell you the illegal—letting in all criminals, rapists, human traffickers, drug traffickers.
And the ones on the left want to tell you, just let them in.
You don't have to check who they are.
They'll be fine.
Well, both are wrong, if there are people who believe that.
And the reality is the following.
And this is from 35 years of experience with it.
Most of the people that come over the border illegally from Mexico, let's say, and then the others, most of them are coming here for understandable reasons.
They want to improve their lives.
And they're coming here because we are the greatest country on earth, which, by the way, the left wing doesn't even acknowledge.
And nobody wants to come to any country any more than the United States, which is probably the best evidence for the greatest country on earth.
Nobody else is fighting this way to come to any other country.
The problem is we don't have resources to take care of everybody.
And therefore we have to make determinations that are fair.
and that are in our interest in growing our country properly.
Every other country does that.
Every other country checks you coming in and tries to let in people who are going to be good people and tries very, very hard to keep out people who are going to be bad people.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Virtually the whole world except illegal undeveloped countries do that.
You can't just walk into Sweden or Italy or England, France, gotta have a passport, gotta have papers.
They're not gonna make you a citizen unless you go through a big thing, because they're a civilized country.
If we want to remain civilized, we're gonna have to keep that.
We'll be back in just a minute.
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There's a lot more to look at.
So the other thing that happened, particularly with our peculiar situation on the border with Mexico is, Because of the nature of the border, large numbers of people can come in all at once.
And when large numbers of people can come in all at once, you can hide people with them.
And the gangs who do this, the drug gangs, the violent gangs, the human trafficking gangs who take young boys and young girls and basically use them for things we can't even describe, they take advantage of it.
They'd be stupid not to.
There they are.
They have a gang.
They want to get some drugs in.
They want to get some young children they can exploit.
They see a thousand people coming over the border that look just like them.
They fix them all up and they put 20 people in the middle of the gang.
And since we don't do any checking and they don't want us to do any checking, there'll be even more coming in that way.
Just to show that this is true.
The mere fact that he's been elected, we now have caravans that have started about a month ago heading toward the United States.
They're coming for the free health care.
That's absurd.
Yeah, come on to the U.S., we'll give you free health care.
Oh, and by the way, we're not going to check you so much at the border.
Well, we'll end up with good people who need health care and need help, too many of them, and we'll go broke.
But we'll also end up with murderers, rapists.
We'll end up with gang members, we'll end up with human traffickers, because they'll see the opportunity that they have to take advantage of us.
I mean, do the Democrats have any common sense or any knowledge of history?
I mean, Jimmy Carter did this in the late 1970s, and it's one of the reasons they threw him out of office.
He was involved in some dispute with Castro, a far more intelligent man than him, although an evil man.
And he said, OK, OK, send me, send me all your people from Cuba.
Yeah, just send them all.
Castro took a puff of his cigar, looked at him and said, OK, naive little peanut salesman, I got it figured.
I'll send you some good people.
I'll send you a hundred thousand people related to those people you have are doing such a great job in your country.
And you all love the Cubans because they're more productive in America than in my dictatorship.
I got about 20 or 25,000 people in jail and insane asylums and I'm going to pick out the worst of them and I'm going to stick them in.
What are those good people?
They may kill a few on the boat coming over.
They're going to kill a lot of you too.
And then we had the Mario boat lift and we had disaster.
Disaster.
Well, we can't repeat that.
We cannot repeat that.
Anything like that.
If they, if they want to get a bill done, Then Biden is going to have to go back to the Joe Biden who helped pass the crime bill of 1995, 96, whenever it actually passed 97.
I've forgotten the exact date it passed.
It got held up for a while, where he negotiated for years and brought together compromises and got, in this case, let's say that the Democrats to agree that there's got to be checking at the border in exchange for the Republicans being looser on a path to citizenship.
He can't do it all his own way.
If he does, then he's not about unity.
Then he's about division.
And we're going to have a divided country.
So this is an opportunity to find out, can he govern?
Is this first couple of weeks where he's just signing dictates Does that indicate he's becoming what he said you are just about two months earlier if you just sign executive order as a dictator?
Or is he going to be a real president in a democracy in which he's going to have to give up at least a third of those objectives in order to get something passed, maybe even more?
Ronald Reagan always said, if I can get 80% of what I want, I won.
If I can get 60%, I didn't do bad.
Even 50, at least I get something.
But we've got to see, can he be a president who accomplishes things or not?
He can't do it by executive order.
This one he can't do.
A lot of what he did do by executive order will be overturned by the courts.
He's going to have to sit down and figure out, how can he take a very narrow, Majority that he's got.
It is paper thin, right?
It's tied in the Senate.
He's just got the vice president.
It's 10 difference in the House.
So this will be a test of what do we have here?
Do we have an effective president or do we have what many Republicans believe we have?
A president who is a divider-in-chief.
Democrats believe he's a uniter-in-chief.
Let's see what he turns out to be.
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