The Village Voice is editorially pro-immigrant, and if not actually pro-crime, then at least anti-police, so they’ve never liked Rudy Giuliani. But that doesn’t mean that they are doing this expose on Rudy for purely political reasons–it’s just fun to catch a politician lying in such detail.

Giuliani is not just a former New York mayor who has to answer to the GOP for policies that were benevolent to immigrants. Nearly three decades ago, when he was the third most powerful person in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, he was also its point man on immigration. In the post of associate attorney general, as well as when he was U.S. Attorney in Manhattan in the late ’80s and mayor in the ’90s, he established a pro-immigrant record that goes far beyond his already-documented support of health care and other benefits for illegals. And if that doesn’t play well with Florida primary voters, neither will the time he took a tough stance on immigrants and wound up being rebuked by federal judges—in part for his treatment of Cuban refugees.

The exploitation of immigration as a campaign issue has already shaped the presidential fortunes of three present or onetime frontrunners: John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Giuliani. McCain’s early national lead disappeared with his prominent link to a Bush-backed immigration bill considered by every other GOP presidential hopeful, including Giuliani, to be too welcoming. Clinton’s slide began when she tried to take both positions on the question of drivers’ licenses for illegals in a primary debate. Giuliani all but abandoned Iowa, meanwhile, where polls indicated that immigration was the highest concern for Republican voters, and where his so-called “sanctuary city” record as mayor was near the top of the list of shifting policy positions that hurt him. Giuliani’s desperate declaration in December that, as mayor, he wanted to deport all 400,000 of the city’s undocumented immigrants but found himself “stuck” with them—a slight variation on his 1994 observation that undocumented immigrants were the kind of people “we want in this city”—became one of the galling contrasts that crippled him in Iowa and diminished his national numbers.village voice > news > Rudy’s Immigration Problem by Wayne Barrett

They also have a story about a possible Giuliani personal connection to illegal workers:Who Built Rudy’s House in the Hamptons? Giuliani’s contractor might not have had a ‘hire standard’ on illegal labor by Wayne Barrett January 15th, 2008.

Mexican president Felix Calderon just appointed his little-known 36-year-old chief-of-staff, Juan Camilo Mouriño Terrazo, “the quiet power behind the throne,” to be Minister of the Interior, the traditional jumping off point for the Presidency, although now in Mexico there is a primary system, unlike in the good old days when the reigning president with his godlike (but term-limited) powers just picked whomever he felt like to be the next president.

In the U.S., Secretary of the Interior is a vaguely comic job, but in Mexico, like most Third World countries, it’s the Big One. Traditionally, Mexico isn’t as scary a country when it comes to disappearances and torture as some other Latin American countries (“Hey, at least we’re not Guatemala!” could be the Mexican national slogan), nor is its Interior Ministry as formidable as the old Soviet Ministry of the Interior, which had a 200,000-man private army for overawing the Red Army in case it didn’t feel like obeying Politburo orders. Still, it’s definitely the coolest job in the Mexican government besides being President (although being Mexico City’s police chief was a lot of fun in the 1970s for Arturo Durazo, a boyhood friend of President Lopez Portillo turned gangster’s chauffeur turned civil servant, who parlayed his $1,000 monthly salary into an estate with 1,200 servants).

Still, you might be wondering why, 489 years after Cortez arrived and began turning Spaniards and Indians into La Raza, this bit of presidential timber looks so Spanish? Well, he is Spanish. Mouriño was born in Spain to a Spanish father and a mother who was a Mexican citizen. His zillionaire father moved the family to Mexico when he was seven, but he remained a Spanish citizen until 18. Nobody seems to know whether the Mexican constitution says a man of his birth and background can or can’t be President. To paraphrase Johnny Tightlips on The Simpsons, “The Mexican constitution says a lot of stuff.”

I’ve been having a hard time getting across the idea that the Hispanic surge of immigration into Los Angeles is so 20th Century. It’s just too expensive now, so the Mexicans are heading to places like Kentucky. Here in LA, the new guys in town are … well, it’s hard to describe exactly who they are since we don’t have any generic terms for them: they’re East European / West Asian and ready to deal. One way to get an idea is too look at this picture of the two men in Britney Spears’s life these days, boyfriend / paparazzi Adnan Ghalib (in white shirt) and vaguely-defined hanger-on Sam Lufti (in blue shirt), riding an outdoor escalator on Ventura Blvd. with Britney, who is wearing what appears to be her wedding dress.

Apparently, Adnan was born in Afghanistan, while Sam was born in LA. I have no idea what each one’s ethnicity is, but they are pretty representative of who you see on Ventura Blvd.

In LA, the New People aren’t generally generic Muslims — I seldom see women in burkhas or similar. Instead, they are often from exotic mercantile minorities in Muslim lands so they are culturally prepared to hit the ground hustling.