Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

I'm amazed to see it, but some truth about an issue actually made its way out in the ongoing, and oftentimes busy, debate over illegal immigration. This summarizes why the issue is so complex that it can't be broken down into a sound byte.

Rudy Giuliani, per Jonathan Martin:

In his brief chat with the media, the former mayor did not delve into why he protected illegal immigrants in New York, but he did discuss it with one local voter inside the restaurant.

"I had 400,000 illegals in New York City," Giuliani explained while awaiting his chicken tenders and beef and vegetable soup in a private room upstairs at Susan's European Cafe.

"The immigration service was only able to deport about 2,000 per year. ... So here is what happens for a mayor: They don’t get rid of anybody. I was going to have 398,000 illegals. As the mayor, I had to figure out what to do with that to make my city safe."

"I didn’t have the luxury of just rhetoric or sound bytes, I had to make my city safe."

And the steps he took that protected illegal immigrants also had the effect of increasing safety in the city, Giuliani argued. Letting the children of illegals into schools, for example, was better than to have them "just running around the streets."

"If we hadn’t let them go to school, we never would have been able to reduce the crime rate like we did," he said, adding that by allowing them to report crime without fear of being deported, they "helped us catch criminals."

And providing illegal immigrants access to health facilities, Giuliani noted, lessened the risk of communicable diseases: "You don't take care of them, you don't take care of yourself."

Ilegals who committed crimes, though, were turned in to immigration authorities, he said.