While the president will give it high marks, in fact, DHS stands at the bureaucratic equivalent of early adolescence, which means it has taken both right and wrong steps, but is still struggling to decide what is important. It shows potential, but it needs more support if it is to achieve long-term success.

There is a growing gap between what DHS is expected to do -- secure our borders, protect critical infrastructure, share better intelligence, defend against weapons of mass destruction, and respond to disasters -- and its actual capacity to do them. The reasons for the gap have to do with strategy, priority, ideology, and politics.

Border enforcement sounds nice, but we've shown no capacity to effectively shut down the Mexican-American border, and the sort of domestic militarization an actual fence would signal is, to say the least, unsettling. Corporate enforcement is important, but ID fraud foils much of it, and the taller our fence and the more stringent our corporate crackdowns, the more sophisticated Mexican document forgery will become, which brings problems all its own, particularly if you fear terrorism.

Trying to stop the flow of immigrants when they reach our border is, in sum, a fool's game. The question is whether you stop some immigrants before they leave home.