By Maria Peña

WASHINGTON – Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday that there have been improvements in border surveillance since 2007 and urged Congress to approve a reform that brings undocumented immigrants out of the shadows.

“We need Congress to create the legal foundation for bringing the millions of illegal immigrants in this country out of the shadows, require them to register and pay all taxes they owe, and enforce the penalties that they will have to pay as part of earning legal status,” she said in a speech to the Center for American Progress.

“Let me emphasize this: we will never have fully effective law enforcement or national security as long as so many millions remain in the shadows,” the former Arizona governor said.

While Napolitano’s address to the CAP offered nothing new, it sent a political message from the Obama administration in favor of reform, despite an outlook that, for now, is anything but favorable.

Both Hispanic lawmakers and groups with similar interests across the country demand concrete action by Congress and the White House to reactivate the debate on comprehensive immigration reform.

In Congress, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) led a national campaign last summer in favor of reform and has been pressuring the White House to invest political capital in the matter.

Migratory reform has been relegated to a place behind other legislative priorities like health care reform, combating climate change and an overhaul of financial regulation.

Nonetheless, Napolitano said that President Barack Obama is committed to the matter “because the need for immigration reform is so clear.”

“When Congress is ready to act, we will be ready to support them,” the secretary said.

Throughout her hour-long presentation, Napolitano repeated the message that illegal immigration is a problem “that clouds our future” and requires a solution instead of being continually put off from one year to the next.

She reviewed what has changed with regard to national and border security since 2007, when immigration reform failed in the Senate.

For Napolitano, these improvements make reform “more attainable” now, considering that in 2007 many lawmakers conditioned their support with a demand that the government beef up vigilance on the border with Mexico, where most trafficking of undocumented aliens takes place.

As an example of the changed paradigm, she cited the “transformation” of security on the southwestern U.S. border through an “unprecedented” investment in human resources, technology and infrastructure.

“Many of the benchmarks these members of Congress set in 2007 have been met,” including an increase of 20,000 agents in the Border Patrol and the construction of more than 965 kilometers (600 miles) of walls and barriers along the border, Napolitano said.

Both milestones “demonstrate that we have gotten Congress’ message,” Napolitano said, and enumerated the measures undertaken by the DHS for the detention and expulsion of undocumented criminals and to sanction companies that continue to hire undocumented workers.

Another major change is that a much larger segment of society now supports the search for a “sensible solution to this problem,” she said.

Immigration reform, she said, should be based on three key elements: obeying the laws, regularizing future influxes of immigration and a formula “firm but fair” for dealing with the 12 million undocumented immigrants who already live in the United States.

She said that a one-dimensional reform like the amnesty of 1986 will not be successful because, for example, it promised to enforce the law but in the end that was not put into practice.

“That helped lead to our current situation, and it undermined Americans’ confidence in their government’s approach to this issue. That mistake can’t happen again, and it won’t happen again,” Napolitano said. EFE