Giuliani Moving Right

Rich Lowry talks about Rudy's movement to acquire conservative votes on immigration. Perhaps, as Lowry points out, abortion is next.

Giuliani outlined his immigration plan and it has some very common sense approaches:

Listed as one of his "12 commitments" to the American people, Giuliani promised to secure the borders and identify every noncitizen in the United States, noting the more than 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

"That's a lot of people to walk over your border without being identified," he said.

The two-term mayor proposed requiring the deportation of any illegal immigrant who commits a felony, building both a physical and a high-tech border fence, deploying a larger and better-trained border patrol, implementing a tamperproof identity card for all foreign workers and students with a single national database of noncitizens to track their status.

The core of Giuliani's policy will rely on the implementation of a system he calls BorderStat. The system would be modeled after New York City's CompStat program, which Giuliani's administration used to reduce crime by measuring which tactics are working effectively and which are not.

Cost is a question, but among Conservatives I don't think that this cost will be one that will be complained about a great deal. After all, securing our nation is the primary role of the federal government so fiscal and state rights conservatives can't really get bent out of shape.