A little bit over a year after my coming on board as Secretary and certainly in the light of what has been a very eventful year, facing challenges -- from the bombings in London in July of last year to Hurricane Katrina to many of the budget challenges we have, including other hazards which may come up in the next year, such as Avian Flu.

This Friday, I'm going to Asia to meet with my foreign counterparts in Japan and China, Hong Kong and Singapore. And this is therefore a good opportunity for me to talk about three areas which I think will be the critical points of triangulation in terms of our next year of opportunity and challenge at the Department of Homeland Security. One of these is preparedness. This past year, we set up for the first time a director of preparedness which would have as a sole function centering and creating accountability for the execution of true preparedness for all hazards in the United States.

The second is addressing the issue of illegal migration. Illegal migration is a problem that has been with us for over 20 years. We have addressed it in fits and starts. Clearly, the American public in 2006 has reached the point that they are demanding serious solutions. And when I say serious solutions, I don't mean cosmetic solutions or feel-good solutions, but I mean solutions that have a real prospect providing a durable resolution of the challenge of illegal migration. The challenge that it brings to the Rule of Law, the challenge in terms of our national security concern, but also the challenge it poses to our desire to reconcile our ideals about border protection with the realities of the economic demand that is bringing literally hundreds of thousands of migrants into this country every single year.

And the third piece I want to talk about briefly is protecting our critical infrastructure. We've had a lot of discussion in the last several weeks about protecting the port. My job, however, is not to go from protecting the ports to protecting the railroads to protecting this and protecting that following along as the media focuses in fits and starts on the particular news of the day. My job is to always make sure that our approach to protecting critical infrastructure is comprehensive, that it looks at all of the threat, not merely the one that happens to be capturing public attention at any given moment and to make sure that it's balanced, to make sure that we do not take steps in the name of protecting ourselves that are so destructive to our way of life and to the foundations of what our society's about that we in the vernacular burn down the village in order to save it.

The essence of Homeland Security in a nutshell is recognizing the tradeoffs and managing the risks. And that means, again as I've said before, not pretending that we can guarantee every single person against every bad thing happening at every moment in every place; we can't do that. And if we could do it, it would be at such a horrendous cost, that I think it would transform this country. So I think we need to continue to drive through an intelligent and properly risk-managed approach to critical infrastructure.

Now, let me turn to each of these topics in turn.
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KW