Trump, Mexico, and the Wall
The title of this CNN story got me curious enough to click on it: “Why some say Mexico already built Trump’s wall — and paid for it.”
Well, not exactly. And certainly not in the sense of the actual physical wall that was blocked by Congress but which is nevertheless being built, and for which Americans are paying.
But here’s what the article has to say:
…[C]ritics of President Andres Manuel López Obrador have been making [the following argument] for months.
Mexico, they argue, actually built US President Donald Trump’s border wall after all — not with concrete or bricks or steel, but with thousands of federal forces like this camouflage-clad commander and the troops following his orders.
And Mexico, they argue, is paying for it.
That explains how an article with a headline like that managed to sneak through CNN – it’s a criticism of Trump, after all, as delivered by Mexican critics of Mexico’s president for cooperating with him.
More:
But experts note that Mexico’s massive deployment of National Guard troops over the past few months has played a major role in blocking migrants from reaching the US border in the first place. It’s a point Trump himself has made at several recent events — a dramatic change in tone from his sharp criticisms of Mexico earlier this year.
“I would like to thank President López Obrador of Mexico for the great cooperation we are receiving, and for right now putting 27,000 troops on our southern border,” Trump told the United Nations General Assembly last month. “Mexico is showing us great respect, and I respect them in return.”
Fancy that – Trump changes tone in response to a change of policy from Mexico, which in turn is a response to his dealings with them. Sounds like win/win at the moment to me.
Well if CNN says so….
I’d assume that it ain’t costing Mexico anywhere near the magnitude of money that paying for the Wall would, but its still a lot of money that the Mexican government has chosen to pay, to help the U.S. to diminish the numbers of aliens trying to illegally cross our border.
P.S.–I note that the MSM is apparently not devoting any major airtime to what is a major crisis/story involving Mexico that should be of obvious concern to us here in the U.S., and that is the recent, apparently major and savage fighting between the Mexican government’s military forces and the Sinaloa cartel, with the government on the losing side of the combat, and forced to release the son of the Sinaloa leader El Chapo that they had imprisoned.
This occurring just across the border from us here in the U.S., and proof that Mexico cannot retain sovereignty over it’s own territory and is, more and more, a failed state.
A development which has major implications for the U.S., for one thing, U.S.-Mexico trade in the first quarter of 2019 totaled $306 billion dollars, 15% of all U.S. trade.
As Mexico slides further into violence, lawlessness, and chaos–it might be a good idea to hold off on that vacation to Playa del Carmen, Cancun, or Guadalajara.
Sounds like win/win at the moment to me.
Well, there’s your problem. Not enough anti-Trump frothing at the mouth.
Next thing you know, you’ll actually be saying good things about him, to the dismay of liberals everywhere.
😀
Snow beat me (again!). I think this story is about to get bigger.
https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/on-mexican-state-collapse-a-guest
On “Mexico will pay for the Wall”, that’s a campaign promise of Trump that I considered more broken than delayed. In fact, his worst, most clear, broken promise that is also worth noting. But I expected that promise to be more BS campaigning, along with a lot of other promises, both Trump and Clinton. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised with how much good Trump has done.
Don Surber is a (too?) huge fan. Here’s his list of kept promises:
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2019/09/trump-kept-his-promises.html
We still need the wall and stronger immigration control, in view of the chaos in Sinaloa state and elsewhere.
Somewhere awhile back, somebody pointed out that although Mexico’s Pres. Obrador hasn’t handed Pres. Trump $ x,000,000,000 to pay for the Wall, he never said that that’s the form the Mexican payment would come in. It can come from sources such as, yes, seizing drug cartels’ assets, and from other sources as well.
If anyone can refresh my memory on this, I’d welcome it.
The other statement I used to read was that the money for the wall ( $8,000,000,000 IIRC) had already been voted for by Congress even (IIRC) before Trump took office, so that in fact he hasn’t been asking for new money but really just asking for Congress to hand it over. (The way the news is reported, I can’t tell if he’s been asking for more than the $8bn or not; but I hear squawks over giving him even $4bn.)
Repeat the request for memory-refreshment.
Thanks.
It’s still not too late to tax remittances to *all* foreign countries and use the funds to house refugees and other immigrant families together as their claims are processed; and… oh yeah!.. fund construction and maintenance of the border wall. Can Trump accomplish this via executive order?
On a larger scale, as we move forward, a closer relationship with Mexico is essential. We’re better off propping up our friend and neighbor here at home than doing the same for some strange race of people on the other side of the Earth. Fortress (North) America, baby!
We should help Mexico get on its feet and achieve a standard of living commensurate with the other economies of North America so we don’t have to depend on a physical barrier to prevent a sub class of forgotten Mexican citizens from basically stealing American bread to feed themselves and their children.
The recent battle between Sinaloa Cartel gunmen and the Culiacan police will only increase the rate at which rational, reasonable adults and their families flee Mexico for the U.S..
The cartels have been the de facto power in Mexico ever since the PRI’s one-party socialist state structure ran aground with the end of the soviets. Now, it’s like the Shining Path sans the idealism on our southern border.
Perhaps Trump’s clandestine services should aid Mexican-American veterans and entrepreneurs in enacting a coup? I mean, isn’t that better than going into business with killers like El Chapo… as Hillary did?
Didn’t Wikileaks report that El Chapo paid $15 million to the Clinton Foundation?
Re my info requests above: I do see that xennady, at
https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/10/21/politicians-and-lying-and-alinsky-revisited/#comment-2460340
said that by holding up so many would-be illegal aliens at the Mexican border, Trump is costing Mexico a bunch of money, which can reasonably be counted as part of Mexico’s paying for the Wall.
*************
Oh good grief. I see that this is precisely Neo’s issue in the present posting. I’m sorry, Neo and commenters. I must have completely forgotten what it said. 😥
I agree completely with the assessment that the Battle of Culiacan is heavily significant for us, as well as obviously for Mexico. In fact, I think I may write to the President on the subject. I’ve not done that since Bush 41.
From reading Claire Berlinski’s article linked to above by Tom Grey.
“The forces that emerged were in the literal sense awesome and awful. Heavy weaponry that would be familiar on any Iraqi, Syrian, or Yemeni battlefield was brought to bear. More and worse: custom-built armored vehicles, designed and built to make a Sahel-warfare technical look like an amateur’s weekend kit job, were rolled out for their combat debut. Most critically, all this hardware was manned by men with qualities the Mexican Army largely lacks: training, tactical proficiency, and motivation.
Then the coup de grace: as the Chapo sons’ forces engaged in direct combat with their own national military, kill squads went into action across Culiacán, slaughtering the families of soldiers engaged in the streets. ”
There are three elements that a caught my eye: the high sums of money needed to fund the custom built armored vehicle, the quality of training of cartel combatants, the level of intelligence needed to attack the soldiers families. I think there is a foreign state involved in the funding, training, and intelligence networking of the cartel: why should a native criminal element be so overwhelming armored, trained, and have an intelligence operation greater than the government the native population could create in its own government?
I think the foreign operative in this case is our own C.I.A. as the drug trade is the agency’s major source of dark money; money that is filtered out to the Oligarchical elites/corporations.
Drop the wall and acquire Mexico. With our laws, that territory could flourish.
“Aquire Mexico”. President Polk initiated the Mexican War in 1846 intending to acquire it. When the army reached Mexico City, the Mexicans begged that the US take over the country because it was so unstable. There had been 50 governments in the previous 25 years. But, communications were slow in those days and the US ambassador concluded a peace treaty before Polk’s instructions to annex Mexico came through.
Although the issue of “remittances” sent to Mexico (check out the workmen with wads of cash in their hands you often see lined up at your local Walmart, sending money back to their people in Mexico) is one that is not that frequently mentioned.
In fact, such remittances–recent estimates put the flow of such remittances to Mexico–money siphoned straight out of the U.S. gas tank–at around $33-35 Billion dollars per year, and trending higher each year.
One estimate puts such remittances for the second quarter of 2019 at $9.4 Billion dollars, a new record high.
This huge amount of money is now Mexico’s largest single source of revenue, reportedly eclipsing Mexico’s annual revenue from their petroleum production.
Taxing, or even preventing such remittances would be a crippling blow to Mexico.
Such huge dollar amounts of remittances being sent to Mexico, I might remind you, while, at the same time, the presence of illegal aliens here in the U.S.–the majority of them from Mexico–results in hundreds of Billions in extra annual expenditures (all sorts of estimates, from the low $100 Billions to over $200 Billion per year) for their care and maintenance; taxpayer money diverted from paying for the needs of legitimate U.S. citizens.
Here’s how I read it:
1. Given the push-back and slow-walking that Trump’s had from the GOP-e and the Dems who want to continue flooding the U.S. with illegals, this is the best that he or anyone else could have achieved on halting illegal immigration.
2. What we really need is this, PLUS a gap-free “wall,” PLUS astronomical fines for hiring illegals (including visa overstayers).
3. The word “wall” is in quotes above, because I find that I both DO and DON’T care whether it’s a physical wall. On the one hand, physical walls really work, provided that they’re sufficiently manned such that they can’t be simply knocked down or breached with impunity. They make entry sufficiently more-difficult that other enforcement activity is thereby helped and rendered more effective. So I really do think that we need walls in places where we don’t currently have them.
On the other hand, I don’t want us uselessly building a fence over the top of some godforsaken mountain that no illegal has ever attempted or will ever attempt to use as a crossing point. I’m fine putting walls where they make sense, and putting troops and drones where they make sense.
On the third hand, however, a really rugged wall is hard to take down once built. By contrast, drones and patrols can simply be withdrawn or sent elsewhere. I want this barrier to outlast the political will for it. It would be helpful (so far as it is possible) for the next Dem or GOP-e administration to find themselves thinking, “Well, I’d actually prefer it if we had more illegal entrants per day, but there’s nothing I can easily do to make that happen without going to a lot of effort, because the systems and barriers currently in place do the job whether I want them to or not.”
4. On the fourth hand — I’m really starting to resemble a Hindu deity, here — if even a rugged wall requires manning and maintenance, perhaps what we really need to put in place is not (solely) a massive piece of steel and concrete, but something even more indestructible; namely, a federal bureaucracy whose budget is somehow financially tied to its success in preventing illegals from either entering the country, or getting paid by an employer once here.
5. I imagine a formula fining the employer $100 per hour of work done by an illegal, plus an additional fine equalling dollar-for-dollar whatever the illegal was paid for the work, plus some stiff fines levied personally on the owners and executive leadership of the firm doing the hiring, would do the trick, provided investigation and enforcement were adequate. You want a hiring manager to look at the theoretical cost-savings of hiring an illegal and say, “Even if there’s only one-chance-in-1000 that I get caught, the consequences are so enormous that I’ll not only never knowingly hire an illegal, but I’ll go to extraordinary efforts to verify the legal status of everyone I hire.”
6. Re: remittances: I wonder if there isn’t some way to use taxes on remittances to specifically alleviate the additional burden on schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure caused by persons who’re here illegally?
Unfortunately, a lot of that requires legislative effort. And that’ll never happen until both houses of Congress have not only a GOP majority, but a small enough percentage of GOP-e participants that there aren’t enough of them to caucus with the Democrats on border-security issues.
Not likely, any time soon.
Given those limitations, I think Trump’s done just fine.
On the takeover of Mexico by the US, I was recently imagining, again, an ex-pat US led succession movement in Baja CA, to create a new country, “Baha”.
This would have both English and Spanish as official languages, taught to all in schools. Would attempt to have free trade with both Mexico & the USA; and generally have more US style laws. Plus stronger anti-Cartel militias, with trained villagers having 2nd Amendment style guns. The new country could copy most US gov’t structures.
Including the non-proportional district based voting, rather than the Euro style.
Most times I think of this mostly as just another fantasy,
“Imagine there’s a new country, it’s easy if you try.
One South of California. Where you can drive, don’t have to fly.”
More US type countries would be better than the USA getting bigger.
Puerto Rico should be independent, too.