President of the Montana Senate, Scott Sales has proposed that the state send $8 million to help fund the border wall and help end the government shutdown.

Sales, a Republican from Bozeman, explained the reasoning behind his proposal.

“There’s an organization called the Foundation for American Immigration Reform,” said Sales. “They estimate that Montana’s cost alone due to illegal immigration is about $36 million annually. The cost of illegal immigration on many fronts, the judicial side, law enforcement, incarceration, benefits from a health and human services standpoint, it costs the federal government about $115 billion.”

Sales did some calculations to determine Montana’s share of the illegal immigration burden.

“I did some figuring,” he said. “I took the GDP of Montana and divided by the GDP of the U.S. and it came out to about two million bucks and I said let’s put in an appropriations bill that would actually sand that money earmarked for the purpose of border security.”

Sales said he put forward two different proposals.

“I have a resolution from the House and Senate to Congress, saying please fund border security,” he said. “That doesn’t require a signature from the governor. The second is actually a bill that would require an appropriation on House Bill 2 and than that money would be send to the federal government. It would have to have a hearing, voted on by the committee, then by the full body of the legislature then it would go to the governor for his signature, but of course he would probably veto it, but, you never know.”

Sales said many on the left have ‘their hair on fire’, not wanting to send a penny to the federal government, however, when it comes to federal money, Montana is more than happy to receive more than it gives.

“In fact, on a biennial budget, we probably take about $4 billion plus of federal money,” he said. “For every dollar that we send to the federal government, we probably get about $1.60 back, so we get a lot more from the federal government than we pay in.”

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