GiuliRomney Attacks!

Rudy has the spine of a mollusk and the consistency of warm jello salad, improbably tempered by a Chihuahuan streak of toothless viciousness. Romney is a robotic opportunist who promises to leave no voting bloc unpandered. Together, they are: GiuliRomney, cybernetic frontrunner in the race for the GOP nomination!
(I credit my wife with this disturbing formulation.)

ImmigrationProf Blog watches with cynical amusement as each tries to out-hate the other:

On August 9, we reported that Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney had accused fellow Republican Rudy Guiliani of being "soft" on immigration when he was mayor of New York, a cruelly ironic accusation given that Romney stands accused of employing undocumented workers at his home in Massachusetts. As they say, for every action, there is a reaction. CNN now reports that Giuliani promised today to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States by closely tracking visitors to the country and beefing up border security.

This is one of the most egregious of Rudy’s many flipperoos. I haven’t paid much attention to Rudy, since it’s been hard to take him seriously as a potential Republican candidate, given his lengthy, well-documented leadership of one of the most liberal cities in the country. I stand by that assessment, but he’s still there in the race, acting crazy and walking back, one by one, each policy stance he once held in public office.

When Giuliani was attacked by Romney a week or two ago about his history of support for out-of-status immigrants in New York City, his campaign avoided the issue entirely, instead trying for a NYPost headline with a snarky takedown:

Campaign communications director Katie Levinson said, "I am not even sure we should weigh in on this, given Mitt Romney may change his mind later today about it. Mitt Romney is as wrong about Mayor Giuliani's position on illegal immigration as he was when he last mischaracterized the mayor's record and later had to apologize. New York is the safest large city in America since Mayor Giuliani turned it around -- it is not a haven for illegality of any kind. The mayor's record speaks for itself."

Elsewhere in the article, ABC gave the following bit of context:

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."

That same year he sued the federal government for new provisions in federal immigration laws that would encourage government employees to turn in illegal immigrants seeking benefits from the city.

Romney has the knives out on this issue since it’s one he’s vulnerable on himself:

For 10 years, Romney used the services of a landscaping company for his Belmont, Mass., estate that hired illegal workers from Guatemala, workers who told the Boston Globe that Romney never inquired about their legal status.

While Romney was governor, the commonwealth of Massachusetts became one of the six states with the largest growth in unauthorized migrant population, from 2002 to 2004, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, with somewhere between 200,000-250,000 new illegal immigrants. Romney was governor from January 2003 until 2007.

Romney in the past voiced support for immigration reform bills far more liberal than the 2007 bill.

The maddening beauty of our primary system is that, even as public opinion moves decisively to the left (or at least as decisively as a herd of black angus moves in response to a few border collies snapping at their tails), the leading candidates for the Republican nomination are driven to renounce previously-held reasonable positions and aspire to new heights of frenzied conservatism by an increasingly isolated “crazy 27%” , thereby ensuring their eventual defeat in the general election. But that still won't necessarily give us a sane, humane immigration bill.