2016-0901 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/09/01/johnson-allies-hit-feingold-security/89717596/:
“You are going to need better fencing in certain areas. I don’t think we need a 1,700-mile wall, but we can utilize technology. We probably need more boots on the ground.”
—-
2016-1209 Washington Examiner
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/senator-the-wall-will-be-built-not-that-expensive-shovel-ready-works:
“In terms of federal spending, it’s not going to be that expensive and if President Trump when he becomes president is talking about an infrastructure program, well this would be a shovel ready project.”
—-
2017-0125 Fox News
https://radio.foxnews.com/2017/01/25/senator-ron-johnson-on-the-border-wall-we-finally-have-a-president-committed-to-securing-the-border/:
“It’s what we had to do. There is no doubt about it. We just had a hearing about a month ago where we had the chief of Border Patrol and the deputy chief of border patrol and I just asked them point blank, do we have enough fencing, no. does fencing work, yes. Should we build more, yes. Fencing actually works. Now you have to worry about tunnels and other situations on our southern border…but we have to secure our border, that’s what this President ran on and personally glad to see he is starting to work on it right away… we have never committed on a bi-partisan fashion to secure our border, we finally have a president committed to doing so we are starting to move on it.”
—-
2017-0203 CNN
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1702/03/nday.03.html:
CUOMO: You were in Israel. You say there’s a lesson about wall and border security that you learned there that we need to take back here.
JOHNSON: Israel was being, you know, had a real problem with illegal immigrants coming in from the southern border, about 16,000 in one year.
In two years, they constructed 143-mile fence, about $2.9 million per mile, and it cut that illegal immigration rate from about 16,000 to I think 18. Cut it by 99 percent.
Fencing walls work. And so we need to learn the lessons from Israel. They are under a constant state of threat. Threat of terrorism. They’ve dealt with it pretty effectively. We need to learn those lessons.
CUOMO: Do you think it was just the wall that they put up, or do you think it was all the attendant changes they made into screening and their opportunities that they provided for people who were coming across to try to limit the need to sneak in?
JOHNSON: Well, on the southern border it was the fence. Within the whole of Israel, they’ve done all kinds of things in terms of security, cyber security, at their airports, all kinds of different layered security measures. We need to do the same thing here.
But fencing and walls work, particularly when they’re constructed in the right areas and in the right way.
—-
2017-0308 Hugh Hewitt
http://www.hughhewitt.com/senator-ron-johnson-ciaspill-ahca-border-wall/:
HH: And in Homeland Security, you