President Donald Trump is backing up his promise to enforce the nation’s border laws with a threat to impose huge tariffs if Mexico does not cooperate.
“I’m going to inform [Mexico’s president] on day one or sooner that if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25 percent tariff on everything they send into the United States of America,” Trump declared at his Raleigh, N.C. rally on Monday
He added: “If that doesn’t work, I’ll make it 50, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll make it 75. Then I’ll make it 100.”
Mexico’s government is keeping a huge population of migrants in southern Mexico because it is trying to suppress the border chaos that would help Trump win the 2024 election.
“There are hundreds of thousands down there,” said Todd Bensman, a researcher with the Center for Immigration Studies who recently visited cities in southern Mexico:
The default position for Mexico’s national interest is let them flow through [to the U.S. border]: “We don’t want to get stuck with them!” … and they only move off of that [pro-migrant] position when the Americans do or say something that forces them.
In June 2019, Trump successfully used the threat of tariffs to strong-arm Mexico into accepting migration curbs. The curbs included the Migrant Protection Protocols which deterred many migrants by denying them the ability to get the U.S jobs they needed to fund their travel to the United States.
Mexico agreed to the 2019 curbs because Mexico’s economy is dependent on agricultural and manufacturing exports to the United States, and because many Mexicans dislike the chaotic migration trade that feeds the cartels and funds elite corruption in their homeland.
On Monday. establishment outlets in the United States were distressed by Trump’s promise to use tariffs to shield ordinary Americans from migration and drugs. For example, the Washington Post wrote on Monday:
A trade war with Mexico alone could significantly raise prices for American consumers, economists say. The United States imported $476 billion from Mexico last year, more than any other country, according to Kim Clausing, who served in the Biden administration’s Treasury Department …
The investment bank UBS has projected the stock market could contract by more than 10 percent from Trump’s tariff plans, while the Peterson Institute has projected they could cost the typical household more than $2,600 per year.
Trump’s 2019 threat was also denounced by U.S. business interests, Democrats, and some of Trump’s economic deputies.
Trump’s 2019 policy was so successful that Democrats quickly killed it once President Joe Biden put a pro-migration progressive, Alejandro Mayrokas, in charge of border security.
Since then Mayorkas has used a variety of rules and loopholes to extract at least 5 million migrants from their poor home countries. That huge illegal inflow has been in addition to the normal airport inflow of legal immigrants and foreign contract workers.
That migration policy is also an economic policy that has provided Biden’s deputies with at least 10 million additional legal and illegal migrants to expand the labor force, suppress wages, inflate real-estate prices, and boost retail profits.
But Mayorkas’ migration policy requires extensive negotiations because Mexico’s government has the power to helpfully hide or chaotically supercharge the flow of migrants across the border.
Mayorkas’s need for Mexico’s cooperation on migrants left Biden with no leverage on other issues, such as Mexico’s decision to roll back its intermittent and very bloody fights with the drug cartels. The cartels’ drug smuggling kills roughly 100,000 Americans per year.
The need for migrant cooperation also left Mayorkas and Biden with little clout when Mexico’s dominant political party passed a law to suppress the power of the nation’s judges in 2024.
But if Trump is elected, Mexico’s government will want to be rid of the growing population of migrants it is storing in southern Mexico, Bensman said.
“It’s painful and uncomfortable and an irritant, it’s like a kidney stone that they are just dying to pass,” Bensman said.
If Trump is elected, the Mexican government, he warned, may quietly release its population of migrants in many small groups, via caravans, bus convoys, and railways before the January inauguration. The tactic is called “Ant Operations,” he said.
“They have their ways of releasing them without appearing to release them,” he told Breitbart News.
Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is willing to let more migrants travel to the U.S. border, Bensman said. But, he added, she “is a pragmatist who would do what she needed if the national interest … was subject to a higher priority, like avoiding [Trump’s] trade tariffs.”
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