Eighty-four years ago, Robert H. Jackson welcomed the Immigration and Naturalization Service into the U.S. Department of Justice.

Jackson’s remarks were short, but something the then-U.S. Attorney General said during that June 14, 1940, address to the civil servants being welcomed into the Department of Justice bears repeating some eight decades after they were first spoken.

“For at this time with our pressing alien problems your service becomes one of the key branches of the government,” Jackson said. “The focus of the country’s attention is upon you and will be for some time to come. The responsibilities of each of you will from now on be heightened. The country looks to you for strong, wise, and intelligent action.”

Immigration will continue to be a contentious issue over the next month as we lurch toward the Nov. 5 presidential election. It was contentious then, too. But last week, for a brief moment at the center that bears Jackson’s name, immigration stopped being contentious for 50 new citizens from 27 countries who took their oath of citizenship administered by Judge Marian W. Payson from the Western District of New York.

We are, once again, at a pivotal point in our history when it comes to securing our borders. We are not at the precipice of war as we were when Jackson spoke to the INS employees in 1940, but the times seem perilous nonetheless. Unrest around the globe is sending more and more people to our borders, and our country is struggling under the weight of keeping the country safe while fulfilling its long-held vision as a place where one can come to lead a better life. Once again, Jackson provides words that we would do well to remember now.

For 50 new citizens, the Carl Cappa Theater of the Robert H. Jackson Center is the place their American Dream began in earnest. It’s fitting, then, that as we struggle with securing our borders while at the same time welcoming those who have entered the country the right way, to remember something else Jackson said 84 years ago in a speech long forgotten to history.

“These are not easy tim.es in which to handle the problems that arise in connection with the alien. The swift currents of international conflict unloose dangerous emotions and distort our normal perspective. In that setting, the greatest single force for national stability will be a confident knowledge on the part of the country that you are doing your job forcefully, effectively — yet calmly and in a common-sense way,” Jackson said.

Immigration enforcement must be forceful, effective, calm and handled in a common-sense way. Those are words both presidential candidates would do well to remember as they make their case in the next month.