$5.6B

As the stalemate concerning the border wall/barrier/fence drags on, it's worth examining just what the Democrats and GOP have been willing to fund in recent years. Tom Elliot provides a small list:

— “Rural Utility Service.” This program costs taxpayers $8.2 billion/year and has no actual purpose after its original intent — bringing electricity to rural communities — was long ago achieved. It’s now being used to bring broadband access to small communities (usually with populations of less than 20,000) ... the majority of its projects are not completed on time or within budget.

— Sugar Subsidies. America, as Democrats frequently intone, faces a health crisis. What they don’t tell us is that it’s largely of their own making, as Congress subsidizes the production of unhealthy foods like sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Eliminating sugar subsidies alone would save $6 billion ....

— Community Development Grants. These grants were created in the 70s to revitalize failing American cities. The program has almost always been plagued with dysfunction, with grants going to wealthy communities and other recipients failing to produce “accountability and results.” ... It’s elimination would save $15 billion over 5 years.

— The United Nations. As the United Nation’s largest contributor, the U.S. in 2016 donated $10 billion to the U.N. As CAGW notes, reducing these contributions just 25 percent would create a savings of $12.5 billion over 10 years ...

— Amtrak. Congress could sell Amtrak to the private sector where it would almost certainly be operated more efficiently, but instead it’s showered in billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies. Over the next five years, these subsidies will cost $9.7 billion.

— Unused Real Estate. Congress appropriates money to maintain federal real estate that’s not actually being used ... Were selling this unused property prioritized, the 5-year savings are estimated at $15 billion. Simply maintaining the unused buildings annually costs $1.7 billion.

— Foreign Aid. American taxpayers currently spend more than $50 billion a year helping develop foreign countries. Many of the recipients are not known for being America’s closest allies — such as Egypt, South Sudan, Uganda, South Africa, Russia, the Congo, Sudan, and Zambia ... Cutting these donations back just 10 percent would be enough to fund the wall.

Of course, funding the wall has nothing to do with its efficacy or the federal budget, or any other practical matter. It's all about not letting Donald Trump fulfill a campaign promise. And that element of #Resistance appears to be more important to Democrats than: (1) the federal workers who remain furloughed, (2) the dreamers who just might be legalized in any compromise agreement that is reached, and (3) the illegal immigrants themselves who are indirectly encouraged to undergo hardship without reward because they're told they can just walk across the border (in places) with no barrier to stop them. But those constituencies are just pawns in a much larger and cynical battle that is as exhausting as it is ridiculous.

UPDATE-1:
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Victor Davis Hansen notes one of the many ironies that accompany the leftist narrative that demands open immigration when he writes:

[One of the] popular progressive narratives in both Mexico and the United States cite America for all sorts of pathologies, past and present. The United States is often damned for prior colonialism and imperialism, as well as current racism and xenophobia.

Why, then, would millions of people south of the border leave their own homeland and potentially risk their lives to encounter a strange culture and language, to live in such a purportedly inhospitable place, and to adopt to an antithetical system based on supposedly toxic European and Protestant traditions?

The answers to these two paradoxes are as obvious as they are politically incorrect and therefore seldom voiced. Life in Mexico [and other Central American countries] is relatively poor, dangerous and often unfree. In contrast, the United States is rich, generous and secure ...

More importantly, millions of Mexican citizens recognize (at least privately) that the United States is not the bogeyman of mostly elite critiques. Instead, it is one of the world's rare multiracial, equal-opportunity societies. It is generous with its entitlements even to those who cross its border illegally, and far more meritocratic than most of the world's highly tribal societies.

Maybe that is why millions of impoverished people from Mexico have left their homes in expectation that they will be treated far better as foreign, non-English speakers in a strange land than they will at home by their own government.

It is ironic that many socialist countries erect figurative and sometimes actual walls to keep their citizens in while we erect walls to keep uncontrolled millions from coming in illegally.

UPDATE-2:
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According to the Dems and their trained hamsters in the media, Donald Trump is anti-Immigrant. Odd then, that he unilaterally proposed an important modification to the H1-B visa program that would allow talented foreign university graduates (mostly in the STEM area) to remain in the United States and get full time employment and a potential path to citizenship after graduation. He tweeted:

“H1-B holders in the United States can rest assured that changes are soon coming which will bring both simplicity and certainty to your stay, including a potential path to citizenship. “We want to encourage talented and highly skilled people to pursue career options in the U.S.”

Yeah, I know, progressives will claim that any immigration policy based on merit is "immoral" — after all, what makes more sense, allowing ten of thousands to cross our borders illegally and become an immediate drain on our social services or allowing talented immigrants to cross our borders legally and contribute. It's really pretty simple, if you think about it for half a second.