No Work Without Pay Act

Madam Speaker, I rise today to address the current government shutdown and the status of the government wall.

It is kind of a frustrating issue to address, because there is so much misinformation out there. The first thing I will address is the unpaid employees. We can pay the unpaid employees, particularly the employees who are working, if we would pass a bill now. We do not have to end this whole thing.

There is a wonderful bill, H.R. 271, introduced by Congressman Brooks--I am a cosponsor--that will immediately pay all of the current, working Federal employees.

I do not have the power to put that bill on the floor, because I am just a regular Congressman from Wisconsin. But the majority leader, if you see him, could put that bill on the floor any time. And if the real concern here is for the Federal employees who work in our airports, who work in the Coast Guard, who work in our prisons--many of whom I know and are great people--if these people really cared about them, that bill would be on the floor next Tuesday and winging its way to President Trump's desk by this time next week.

It is a mystery to me why, when so many politicians purport to care about the Federal employees, they will not bring forth this bill to pay them without having the whole issue solved.

The next issue I am going to address is these people who say President Trump cannot compromise. I don't know whether they haven't been paying attention the last 2 years, or whether they just love to make things up.

For the public to understand, under normal circumstances if we are going to build a wall, the wall is in what we call an appropriation bill, or what people back home would refer to as a budget. President Trump ran on the wall, and the wall is necessary, and we will talk about that in a second. Nevertheless, President Trump would have wanted funding for this wall in some budget.

For his first 2 years, President Trump was sent budgets by Congress, or spending bills by Congress, that did not contain a wall. That was frustrating to him, but because he did not want to shut down the government, and did not want to penalize the government employees, President Trump, particularly, with a big omnibus bill about a year ago, signed big spending bills without a wall because he compromised.

You will recall that originally people talked about this wall being $20 billion. President Trump is now asking for $5.7 billion. In the last week, I have taken time to meet with the former head of the Border Patrol. I have been on the Arizona border, and it disappoints the experts in the field, the people on the border themselves, that Donald Trump has compromised so much as to want only funding for a fraction of the wall.

So I would say, coming down from $20 billion to $5.7 billion is a big compromise. I would say twice signing entire appropriations for his first 2 years in office without the wall, is a big compromise by President Trump.

President Trump, last Saturday, also decided to extend DACA, and decided to extend temporary protected status on people. Now, what I found out from listening to the Border Patrol is that when you talk about DACA, insofar as the President talks about it, it encourages more people to come here from south of the border because they will assume DACA is a permanent thing, and that more and more people will be added to it.

But, despite the fact that it might have been irresponsible to talk about DACA and extending it again, President Trump, in an effort to compromise, decided to throw these other policy items in the mix on Saturday.

I sometimes slip, instead of calling President Trump the Commander in Chief, I call him the compromiser in chief, because he has given so much to twice sign annual bills without funding for the wall and asked for funding for only a fraction of the wall.

When I was down on the border, I saw places where the wall needed extensions. President Trump is not asking for enough money for the extensions that the Border Patrol needs. But in the interest of compromise, President Trump has asked for $5.7 billion. I will talk in a second about how much money that is. I know for me, $5.7 billion is a huge amount of money. But let's talk about what other people are willing to vote on around here.

Madam Speaker, $5.7 billion for the wall is about one-seventh of what we spend every year on foreign aid. I never hear Congressmen come up here and rail against all the money we are spending on foreign aid and how we could do wonderful things if we only kept that money at home. But all of a sudden, with one-seventh of the cost of foreign aid, we have a battery of people on the other side of the aisle saying we could do so many better things with that money, when in the wink of an eye, they are going to pass appropriation bills spending seven times that much, year, after year, after year, after year on foreign aid.

President Trump greatly increased the defense budget--more than I would have liked. I complained about it a little bit. The funding for the wall would be about one-twelfth of the increase--not the total budget--the increase in the defense budget under President Trump.

Again, I objected. Almost nobody around here, however, objected to this large increase in the defense budget. But now it comes to the wall, and all of a sudden, they can't bring themselves to vote for it.

Is this a crisis? You bet it is a crisis. Like I said, I was down on the border last week in Sasabe, Arizona. First of all, we have a huge cost to the government at the border. People are coming across the border using our medical facilities. The Governor of California has outright said he will be happy to have all of the immigrants. I guess everybody in the Western Hemisphere can come to California and have the government, which to a certain extent means the Federal Government, pay for medical costs.

Madam Speaker, 90 percent of the heroin comes across the southern border. Now, you hear people say that most of that is at selected points of entry. But the reason most of the heroin comes in at selected points of entry is because we are not catching virtually anybody between the points of entry. They are just walking in where there is no wall.

I don't know--given the huge number of people who die of heroin every year--that we can say that not putting walls in the gaps in the current system is not something that is necessary and not something that we need to do to solve that heroin crisis.

There are a lot of parts of that heroin crisis, but when that amount of heroin is coming across south of the border, part of the answer is to complete the wall.

We are getting more and more children on our border. What is going on right now, so people understand, is parents are sending their children to the border. And if the children come to the border, which is all the easier, because they may have somebody escort them to the border, we will take those children and deliver them to a relative around the country.

I would say if a child is taking the hazardous trek, albeit helped along the way, to come to the United States, and the parents are sending the children with somebody who may not be their relative, sending their children because once the children are here, the children can say they are living in America, and the parents can come here under the family rules and join them; it is a huge crisis.

Other people coming and trying to get between the points of entry are frequently found dying. I have been told--I haven't confirmed it--that in the Tucson sector alone, in the last 15 or 16 years, over 2,000 people have been found dead of dehydration, starvation, and what have you. That is what you call a humanitarian crisis.

The overall cost on our overburdened government--different people can argue how much illegal immigrants cost this country. The Heritage Foundation--some people may not agree with them--feels it is over $50 billion a year.

Madam Speaker, when it is costing us $50 billion a year between the healthcare costs, the welfare costs, the education costs, and the criminal justice costs, how can you not spend $5.7 billion to begin to solve this crisis?

The next thing to address, it is sometimes said, and people say it to my right, that everybody wants to do something about the border. I question that, given what other people are saying.

It may surprise Americans out there to know that there are a lot of people out there who buy into the idea that the United States can be kind of like Europe and we can have open borders and everybody can walk wherever they want.

How do we know this? All around the country we have sanctuary cities in which mayors or sanctuary counties in which county executives or, in the case of California, a whole State in which local officials are forbidden to ask people whether they are here legally or not. The only explanation for that is Americans are electing people around the country who do not believe in borders and who are perfectly happy to have tens of millions of people come across our southern border, some good, some not so good.

But, obviously, these people do not believe in border security. If you believe in border security, Madam Speaker, the Governor of California would not be openly inviting everybody to come to California for free medical care.

It is clear that a lot of people out there do not want a closed border.

Another piece of evidence for that, Madam Speaker, is you have Members of Congress saying we should get rid of ICE and get rid of immigration enforcement. People who publicly say we should get rid of immigration enforcement--even though it is a preposterous idea, of course--border security is not a priority for them. They are the type of people who, on examining the situation, can see no reason why we cannot accept 5, 10, 15, or 20 million other illegal immigrants across the border.

By the way, one other thing I found out talking to Border Patrol is nobody knows exactly how many illegal immigrants are in the country. Madam Speaker, you sometimes heard it said 11 million, 12 million. It could be 15 million, or it could be 20 million. We really aren't counting, and the people on the border, Border Patrol themselves, will admit that they don't know how many people are coming across the border.

Now, Madam Speaker, the next thing you hear is: Oh, I care about border security. I just don't believe in the wall.

Why don't I believe that? I don't believe that they really care about border security because walls work.

Now, behind me, I have pictures of four parts of a wall in other parts of the world.

Here we have a wonderful wall which cut illegal immigration by over 90 percent in the San Diego-Tijuana area. That wall works.

I was in Nogales, Arizona. Here is a wall that was recently refurbished, and that wall works. Unfortunately, as you will notice, the wall ends, and the Border Patrol and the ranchers who live near this area, one of whom I recently talked to, said all of a sudden MS-13 showed up and they had to give them dinner at the ranch. These people desperately want this wall to be extended a little bit.

Here we have more wall in Sasabe, Arizona.

Here we have a wall that has cut illegal immigration down to almost nothing in Israel.

I was not able to find a wall, which has also been successful--I have got to get a picture. We will be back next week with a picture of a wall between Jordan and Syria.

Madam Speaker, you might say: Why are you talking about a wall between Jordan and Syria? Because a lot of that wall was paid for by the United States.

Now, why did the United States have no problem funding a wall in San Diego or a wall in Sasabe or upgrading the wall in Nogales? Many of my colleagues on the right side of me here had no problem voting for these walls. But there is something different about these walls from the walls President Trump wants. These walls were proposed by somebody other than President Trump.

When it was President Clinton proposing to build a wall in San Diego, people didn't say it was immoral to have a wall.

When President Obama was extending or upgrading the wall in Nogales, Arizona, people didn't say: ``President Obama is an immoral person. Walls look bad.'' You never even heard about it. I didn't know about it until a couple weeks ago.

When you have a wall going up in Sasabe, which desperately has to be extended, that wall was built under President Bush, under appropriation bills, and not a peep. Nobody said it was immoral when President Bush built a wall.

So, Madam Speaker, now we get down to, I reluctantly conclude, because I have to wonder when you have these other successful walls around the world, when we have no problem voting for walls for Jordan for goodness' sake, why, all of a sudden in this large budget--and every budget has things in it we don't like. Why, all of a sudden, do we go through all this heartburn, put all these Federal employees through financial distress, why do we do it when, in the past, we have built walls all the time? I have to conclude, sadly, part of it is some people want President Trump to fail.

The fact that not building a wall means all that much more heroin across the border, it means many more people sneaking across the border or escorted across the border by the Mexican cartels--and, by the way, today the Mexican cartels run the border.

So to come in this country means you are hostage for awhile to the Mexican cartels, which may be one of the reasons why they don't do a very good job of protecting the women down there. It is why it can be very expensive for people. It is why people who try to escort you across the border who aren't a member of the cartel, if they are caught, will be killed and, apparently, in some cases, skinned alive. But we don't want to stop the current situation.

Again, the folks back home will have to wonder: Why can people build a wall in Jordan, why can we let President Clinton build a wall in San Diego which is very effective, why can we let President Bush build a wall, why can we let President Obama upgrade our walls, but all of a sudden, President Trump becomes President and we have to have a shutdown because we can't vote for a budget with a wall in it?

I have voted for spending bills under chief executives who were Democrats and Republicans, and I usually agree with the Republicans, but it never occurred to me to vote against a spending bill because I didn't like other policies of the chief executive.

So here we have it, Madam Speaker. We will refresh your memory one more time: walls work. They work in Israel; they work in San Diego; and they work in Nogales.

We have paid for many walls both in this country and in other countries; and other countries build walls, and they are successful.

If we do not build a wall, we will continue to have people starve as they try to come in here inappropriately. We will continue to have bad people come across the border who commit crimes. We will continue to have people come across the border who are here for our generous welfare benefits.

This is something that didn't occur to me until I got down to the border and talked to Customs. They said that, when you look in people's wallets and you look in people's purses, they find food stamps--EBT cards--in those purses. In other words, people are coming here to get our welfare benefits.

It would be much better if we completed the wall and funneled people through the normal entry points so we could keep some of the criminal element out of the country, so we could keep people who are coming here just to take advantage of our generous medical systems--all with Federal dollars going into this that our Governor of California and mayor of New York are so eager to give away--so we can solve this crisis.

All it takes is somebody to be willing to pass a budget, a budget that is too free-spending otherwise, by the way. I don't like all the excessive spending in the budget, but every budget is a compromise, and we are willing to build the wall.

I hope, in the interim, that my colleagues who at least are pretending now to care about the Federal employees will bring a separate bill to the floor, which they can do at any time. A wonderful bill, H.R. 271, Mo Brooks, a great guy, bring that bill to the floor so we can pay the Coast Guard, we can pay the guys and gals working in the Federal prisons, and we can pay the TSA guys. So, Madam Speaker, even if you don't feel like spending anything on the wall today, at least they can get paid for the work they are doing.

Madam Speaker, you are crying crocodile tears if you do not cosponsor those bills and bring those bills to the floor but then claim that you have sympathy for the Federal employees. We do not have to solve the other issues to get these people paid.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.