From Justice To Homeland Security And Back?

Hearing President George W. Bush frame the debate on national TV, immigration has a chance of returning to its pre-9/11 abode within the trinity of equality, justice and opportunity.
The incorporation of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service into the Department of Homeland Security had signaled the transformation of one of America’s founding tenets into the imperative of national security.
The legal-illegal dimensions of the immigration debate obscured the core issue: how to ensure the overall enrichment of American values, society, power and accomplishments without imperiling the nation’s security, supremacy of rule of law and overburdened public services.
With passions running high on both sides of the debate, participants found themselves caught in a chicken-or-egg debate. Tighter border security before the regularization of undocumented aliens or vice versa? President Bush began his speech with the imperative of boosting border patrol personnel and technology before transitioning to the issue of undocumented aliens already in the United States. In retrospect, Bush’s speech was more of a thematic tapestry than an aggregation of political, economic, cultural and national security brushstrokes.
Doubtless, the House’s restrictive immigration bill and the Senate’s attempts to offer a more humane approach are rooted in their divergent institutional structures and electoral imperatives.
As the person responsible for signing into law a reconciled version of the two approaches as well as for the ultimate judgment of the American people, President Bush certainly felt he had to go on prime-time TV to press the case for action.
In acknowledging the complexities of the issue, the president alerted the country to the real and lasting consequences of playing on fears. In showing the compassionate side of America, Bush was equally vigorous in his defense of the supremacy of the rule of law. In essence, people who have paid their debts to society for breaking the law can have a second chance.
The real value of Bush’s intervention was less in the articulation of the philosophical dimensions of the immigration debate than in the forceful advocacy of the urgency of a comprehensive solution to a complex problem.
Immigration may never return to the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. Americans are certainly capable of doing justice to one of their core founding principles through their collective conscience.