Politics & Power Quote by Janet Napolitano

Napolitano’s genius here isn’t poetry; it’s bureaucratic inevitability dressed up as consensus. The repeated “it’s important” reads like a metronome: steady, hypnotic, hard to argue with, and notably light on specifics. That’s the point. She’s building a rhetorical safe house where almost any listener can move in. Economic growth? Check. Public safety? Check. National security? Check. By stacking these frames back-to-back, she quietly collapses competing political camps into a single shared premise: immigration isn’t a niche issue or a partisan hobbyhorse, it’s infrastructure. You don’t “win” infrastructure debates; you manage them.

The phrase “in conversations with members of the Senate and others” signals another move: laundering conflict into elite agreement. She doesn’t claim the Senate supports her policy; she claims they “recognize” importance. Recognition is the lowest, safest rung of buy-in, but it’s enough to imply seriousness and isolate dissent as unserious. It’s classic Washington talk: all process, no hostages.

Then comes the closer: “not something that’s going to go away.” That line functions like a pressure tactic, and it’s aimed at both sides. To restrictionists, it suggests demographic and economic forces will outlast crackdowns. To reformers, it’s a warning that moral urgency won’t be solved by speeches alone. In the post-9/11 era, with DHS and “security” newly central (and Napolitano later leading that department), the subtext is clear: immigration is being framed not just as a human story, but as a governing problem that must be absorbed into the national security state.