Campaign Action
As the administration quickly approaches a disastrous, historically unpopular 100 days mark, America’s most racist Keebler elf has a pretty offensive plan to salvage Donald Trump’s failing presidential campaign promise to build a “big, beautiful” wall along the entirety of the southern border and have Mexico pay for it, and it’s exactly what someone named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III would brainstorm:
“We're going to get paid for it one way or the other," Sessions said on ABC's This Week. "I know there's $4 billion a year in excess payments, according to the Department of the Treasury's own inspector general several years ago, that are going to payments to people — tax credits that they shouldn't get.”
"Now, these are mostly Mexicans," he continued. "And those kind of things add up — $4 billion a year for 10 years is $40 billion. There are a lot of ways we can find money to help pay for this."
Not only is this goblin racist as all hell, he has no clue what he’s talking about. First of all, the report he cites makes no mention of Mexicans, or any other nationality for that matter. According to the most recent data from Pew, Mexicans make up about half of the undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. But to Sessions and his white nationalist buddies, all undocumented immigrants are Mexicans. And if they’re all Mexicans, they must love their public benefits. Which brings up the second matter:
Sessions appears to be referencing a 2011 audit report Trump also cited while campaigning. As Politifact explains, the report said that in 2011, $4.2 billion in child tax credits was paid to people filing income taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) instead of a Social Security number. Some of these filers are illegal immigrants, but many are legal foreign workers, and the audit did not say how many are Mexican.
"The vast majority of that $4.2 billion, the filer may be undocumented, but you have to have a child to receive it," said Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "And the children are overwhelmingly U.S. citizens."
“The people who benefit from the child tax credit are American children,” Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) said in 2011. “The people who claim the tax credit are their working parents. If immigration is your concern, set aside and view of the immigration status of their parents. It is irrelevant! The child tax credit requires a child’s Social Security number. The benefits go to the United States citizen children.”
Of course, in Donald Trump’s eyes, the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants, especially the brown ones, aren’t real Americans. Pretty disgusting stuff from a guy with an immigrant mom. Say, if Sessions really is looking for welfare-mooching immigrant sons to shake down for a wall that isn’t happening anyway, here’s a pretty good start.
