Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani told an audience in Davenport last night that as president he would end illegal immigration by increasing the number of border security agents by 50 percent and installing more technology to monitor border-crossing activity.
Giuliani also lambasted the “liberal” U.S. media and vowed to reorganize the State Department so it could respond every time the U.S. is criticized in the foreign press.
“Every single person that got appointed ambassador I would say to them, ‘What’s the purpose of your representing us in this country? The main purpose is to make America popular there. The second purpose is to explain that country to us, not the other way around,'” Giuliani said.
Restoring America’s reputation around the world would be one of his goals as president, according to Giuliani, but he would not be willing to abandon tactics in the war on terror — like water-boarding terror suspects — which international have been criticized internationally. Giuliani cited tactics he used to prosecute the mafia while he was U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.
“I did it by electronic surveillance and aggressive questioning. None of them wanted to give me the information. They didn’t walk into my office, and say, ‘I want to tell you about all those mafia murders I participated in,'” Giuliani said, rapping his knuckles on a stand as if he were knocking on a door, getting chuckles from the crowd. “(We) got it because we arrested them. We got very significant charges on them and we questioned them for long, long periods of time with very aggressive techniques.”
Earlier this week, Fred Thompson — one of Giuliani’s rivals for the GOP presidential nomination — proposed stronger border security measures as well as cuts in federal grants to so-called “sanctuary cities” as well as states which fail to report illegal immigrants to federal agents.