One of President Donald Trump’s top congressional allies, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), seemed to unintentionally go viral on Monday after he reacted emotionally to immigration statistics that contradict Trump’s agenda.“We found that they [immigrants] reduced government deficits by 14 and a half trillion dollars,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, told Tim Miller of The Bulwark on Monday. Bier had earlier testified before the Senate Budget Committee to discuss how immigrants impact the US budget. Trump insists that immigrants are a drain on taxpayer resources.”One segment from that testimony went viral,” Bier told Miller. “It was from my senator — one of my senators from here in Louisiana — John Kennedy. It seems like he didn’t really want to engage with you on the merits of the immigrants’ impact on the budget and instead wanted to do some like hee-haw ad hominem attacks.”Kennedy attacked Bier for praising Democrats who urged soldiers not to follow illegal orders (and adding they should urge them not to do anything unethical either) and, similarly, for referring to the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to deport 100 million immigrants as “ethnic cleansing.”“You trigger my gag reflex,” Kennedy said to Bier at one point.“When you look at the big picture, the big picture is: immigrants in the United States face all kinds of unique barriers to applying for government benefits,” Bier explained to Miller. “If you’re here illegally, you’re categorically barred from most federal benefits, including the two largest sources of government spending — Medicare and Social Security.”For these and other reasons, Bier concluded about immigrants that “on average, they’re less costly to government and help reduce the deficits, particularly when you look at those areas — Social Security and Medicare — where they’re using significantly less than the U.S.-born population. And because they work at 12 percentage points higher than the average, they also end up paying more in taxes per capita than the average U.S.-born person as well. So they’re improving things at both ends of the spectrum when it comes to taxes and benefits in the United States.”Kennedy’s “gag reflex” comment is part of his larger history of using colorful language to express his views. Earlier in March, when then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claimed under oath to Kennedy that Trump authorized her quarter-billion dollar ad campaign, Kennedy said he was as “mad as a momma wasp.”“I was stunned when Noem answered categorically that the president approved every single bit of it,” Kennedy later told Fox News. “Later that day, I got a call from President Trump. He was mad as a mamma wasp. He said, ‘Kennedy, I hope you understand that I had nothing to do with this.’ I said, ‘I do believe you, Mr. President.’”Similarly, when it was reported in January that Trump was contemplating seizing Greenland from Denmark similar to how it had overthrown Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Kennedy used a sharp insult to critique the idea.”Let me give you my perspective,” Kennedy said. “Even a modestly intelligent ninth grader knows that to invade Greenland would be weapons-grade stupid.”
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