Ensuring national security is "an effective use of taxpayer money," including spending upfront funds for the United States' border with Mexico, Sen. James Lankford said Friday.
"Obviously most of the area between Mexico and the United States already has some kind of physical barrier," the Oklahoma Republican told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.
"This is not something new. For individuals saying are we going to build a wall physical barrier? That's been done years ago. We're talking about the gaps in between."
Every country in the world focuses on national security, Lankford said, and he learned while visiting with Central American leaders that border security is vital there as well, as they are "very concerned about the number of people coming through their countries."
When it comes to security issues facing the United States, Lankford said both the Mexican and Canadian borders are areas that should be able to be secured.
"We've talked about this since the 9/11 Commission," said Lankford. "How do we secure our ports to make sure we don't have materials moving into our port areas and how do we make sure we limit the flow of drugs and limit of flow of terrorism coming in?
"The vast majority of people from Mexico are coming for work. That's part of the immigration conversation, to fix our Visa system. We do legitimately have individuals coming in for nefarious reasons. We've got to finds a way to filter that out."
There has been talk of forcing Mexico to pay for a wall by raising border taxes on goods coming into the United States, and Lankford said other countries already levy taxes onto the United States in a similar manner, "but we have just never done that to be able to balance it out...it was a surprise that they highlighted that and said this may be the way to pay for the border wall."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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