Mexico. Part Two
Trump has four, far bigger, gripes with Mexico. They are more compelling than his Canadian squabbles.
One, suddenly Mexico’s trade surpluses are an astounding $170 billion or more. Indeed, it grows second only to China’s! And it is predicated on assembling Chinese materials into finished goods that can thus brazenly escape tariff laws aimed at Chinese mercantilism. In sum, Trump sees Mexico, our neighbor, partnering with China to hurt America.
Two, it reaps an incredible income of $63 billion in remittances from expatriate and largely illegal aliens working in the U.S. And many or indeed most of them are subsidized by the American taxpayer with health, housing, food, health, and educational help that frees up cash to be sent home.
Until Trump, Mexico encouraged (“a beautiful thing” in the words of former president Obrador) millions of its own to flee northward, in a win/win/win/win strategy: a) Mexico no longer has to subsidize and support millions of its poorest, indigenous people; b) Mexico enjoys a Frederick Jackson Turner “safety valve,” as the oppressed go north rather than to Mexico City in protests; c) Mexico gets rich off its expatriate, remittance-sending poor; and d) it builds a leftwing sympathetic expatriate political presence inside the U.S. to ensure deference to Mexico City.
Three, its drug cartels kill 60,000-100,000 Americans a year through overdoses by masking lethal fentanyl as other less toxic drugs. It knowingly lets in and imports billions of dollars worth of Chinese raw products to be processed for northern export.
The total income gains to the Mexican economy?
Add in all Mexican opioid and fentanyl income, coupled with vast illegal alien smuggling fees that exploded under Biden’s open border, 12 million illegal alien entries, and there is somewhere between $10 and $30 billion in cartel profits.
So, add up $175 billion in trade surpluses, $63 billion in remittances, and say $20 billion in cartel profits, and Mexico siphons of some $258 billion from America, all due to some degree of illegality—violating the spirit of the old NAFTA free-trade deal, violating U.S. immigration law, and violating U.S. drug laws. In terms of blood and treasure lost, most overt enemies have not done America such damage.
Four, given all of the above, the Mexican boutique anti-Americanism and “Yanqui Go Home!” boilerplate of the past has utterly worn out the goodwill of Americans.
When illegally residing Mexican nationals boo an American soccer team and root for Mexico’s—in Los Angeles—or shut down our freeways waving the flags of a nation to which they refuse to return while burning the flag of the nation in which they demand to stay, illegally so, or when a Mexican president brags, like Obrador, that he has sent 40 million illegally into the U.S. and urged them not to vote Republican, then Americans are getting tired of something that might be called Mexican hubris and cheap anti-Americanism. We hear ad nauseam about Mexico’s negative views of the U.S. But now we rarely hear that 60 percent of the nation has an unfavorable view of Mexico, according to a recent Pew poll.
One would expect the Mexican government to ask itself why millions want to leave and what they can do to prevent that. And what customs, laws, and regulations result in such dissatisfaction that demands remediation.
But instead, their government usually lectures the U.S. on how lucky it is to receive their impoverished. Or worse, it boasts how ironic that they are doing demographically to win what they lost militarily in the 1846-48 Mexican War.
In sum, Canada’s imbalances are solvable. But the Mexican asymmetries are far greater, transcend Trump, and involve a litany of historic, cultural, economic, social, and political disparities.
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