Mexico’s President Proposes Retaliatory Tariffs to Counter Trump
So…do we have a Mexican standoff?
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum proposed retaliatory tariffs to counter President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose 25% tariffs on all products from her country if she didn’t stop drugs and illegal aliens from spilling over the border.
From The Associated Press:
Sheinbaum said she was willing to engage in talks on the issues, but said drugs were a U.S. problem.“One tariff would be followed by another in response, and so on until we put at risk common businesses,” Sheinbaum said, referring to U.S. automakers that have plants on both sides of the border.She said Tuesday that Mexico had done a lot to stem the flow of migrants, noting “caravans of migrants no longer reach the border.”She also said Mexico had worked to stem the flow of drugs like the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl, despite an influx of weapons smuggled in from the United States. She said the flow of drugs “is a problem of public health and consumption in your country’s society.”Sheinbaum also criticized U.S. spending on weapons, saying the money should instead be spent regionally to address the problem of migration. “If a percentage of what the United States spends on war were dedicated to peace and development, that would address the underlying causes of migration,” she said.
I’m kind of shocked the AP admitted this fact about Sheinbaum: She is “a stern leftist ideologue trained in radical student protest movements.”
Could you imagine what Sheinbaum and VP Kamala Harris would have done if the latter won on November 5 instead of Trump?
So, yeah. Mexican standoff?
Also, you know the lobbying effort began before November 5, trying to gain exemptions or arbitrary enforcement. I bet the effort intensified on November 6.
Tariffs are a bad idea. Yes, they would hurt the consumer. Do you think our bills are high now? They would also hurt the workforce.
I wonder who will blink first.
Now, on the other hand, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he had a great phone call with Trump.
Trump also threatened Canada with 25% tariffs for the same reason: drugs and illegal aliens.
Trudeau immediately contacted Trump after he posted his threats on Truth Social:
I had a good call with Donald Trump last night again. We obviously talked about laying out the facts, talking about how the intense and effective connections between our two countries flow back and forth. We talked about some of the challenges that we can work on together.It was a good call. This is something that we can do, laying out the facts, moving forward in constructive ways. This is a relationship that we know takes a certain amount of working on, and that’s what we’ll do.One of the really important things is that we be all pulling together on this, the Team Canada approach is what works. That’s where, putting aside partisanship, that’s where I reached out immediately to [Ontario Premier] Doug Ford to agree with him that we would have a first minister’s meeting this week to talk about the United States. Talked with [Quebec Premier] Francois Legault and some other premieres as well. There’s work to do, but we know how to do it.
Trudeau already announced Canada would limit immigration after the country messed up after allowing too many people in when the pandemic ended.
Trudeau also admitted the government should have stepped in sooner:
Trudeau’s remarks came during a nearly seven-minute video he posted online over the weekend, during which the prime minister laid out the reasons why Canada was putting limits on its temporary foreign worker program, while also reducing the number of permanent residents allowed entry into Canada by as much as 27% by 2027.Trudeau largely blamed “bad actors,” such as corporations and universities, for enticing immigrants to come to Canada, where there was a massive labor shortage following the pandemic. He pointed out that many of these predatory entities lured hordes of immigrant workers with false promises of college degrees, permanent residency, jobs and more.However, Trudeau also suggested that the federal government was at least partly to blame for not “turn[ing] off the taps faster” after the country’s labor shortage waned.
“Looking back, when the post-pandemic boom cooled and businesses no longer needed the additional labor help, as a federal team, we could have acted quicker, and turned off the taps faster,” said Trudeau. “Immigration is primarily a federal job. We have the levers to rein it in. So we are.”
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