Final Paper

Lehi Dickey

PUAD 6815

March 21, 2013

Professor Frank Scott

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Illegal immigration has been a complicated issue for the United States for the last century and a half. How to best correct America's immigration debacle is definitely a moral dilemma for many people. With the days of Ellis Island steamboats and open-door policies behind us, we are struggling to define the rights of those people who are coming to our country illegally. A multitude of issues arise from this situation: should illegal immigrants be able to work? Should they receive health care? Should they be educated in the public school system? Should they receive welfare benefits such as food stamps and unemployment checks? These, and many more questions are perplexing our government and its constituents.

What is the moral and or ethical thing to do? Ethics is a way of being rather than adherence to rules or precepts, or making a string of decisions, but rather refusing to accept whole cloth… (Stivers, 2008, p.147). Morality is both subjective and objective, it just depends on what state' it is in from its genesis to its internalization.

Morality is subjectively created, then externalized and made communicable, tangible, and therefore objective, and then internalized from the objective state making it subjective as it's held in the mind of the individual. I have chosen to focus my ethical issue analysis on the following public issues: health care and education. The key to being a successful public administrator is to have a balance and control of one's objective and subjective responsibilities. A key question that public administrators must...