TRUMP ANNOUNCES 25% TARIFFS ON ALL MEXICAN/CANADIAN IMPORTS "ON DAY ONE"
- Gonzalo Santos
- Nov 25, 2024
- 7 min read
Here's Trump's answer to the Mexican government's polite, diplomatic, confident, announced intention to send a delegation to Washington to "present" Mr. Trump with the actual hard facts of the enormous contributions to the U.S. economy by the millions of hard-working Mexican immigrants - with and without papers - and the equally enormous benefits to the U.S. economy and the other two countries parties to the T-MEC free trade, tariffs-free agreement.
The idea was to "educate" Trump and "persuade" him to cease with his repeated counterproductive threats to launch massive deportations "on Day One," as well as impose onerous tariffs on the U.S.'s neighbors and biggest trading partners.
We have repeatedly emphasized that that was a most naive, deluded approach to dealing with Trump and his band of economic nationalists and neo-mercantilists, white supremacists and rabid xenophobes.
It's a profound misreading of who and what the neighboring countries of North America are actually dealing with: an out-and-out neofascist project led by an authoritarian cult leader out to bring everyone anywhere near his reach "to heel."
He seeks to overthrow the ongoing neoliberal model of economic integration of North America, and he seeks to empty the country of non-white residing immigrants - residing or incoming - and "return" the country to white "greatness” again.
People are, both inside the United States and in the neighboring countries, understandably incredulous of what is afoot. People are still in deep denial.
Many Latinos, incredibly, voted for Trump on the belief "he did not mean all that deportation talk" - it was all mere "campaign talk to win votes". One can therefore ask, if that was the case, what kind of society is it, then, that requires a politician to cater to voters in such extreme xenophobic terms to win elections?
Likewise, in Mexico the bulk of the political class and commentocracy in the mass media believed Trump was bluffing on executing mass deportations and threats of closing the border - physically or through high tariffs -, given that "everybody knew" that would be like "cutting one's nose to spite one's face." Not so, Trump and his minions think they are stopping the brown and black "invasion" and preventing the "poisoning of America's blood."
That is, folks in denial have granted Trump an essential rationality he does not possess, and minimized his threats as mere campaign rhetoric when in fact he is dead serious. They just can't come around to see how thoroughly fascist-minded the man and his entourage really are. AMLO made that mistake, repeatedly; and so have up 'till now, unfortunately, the new team in government - to their peril.
I strongly disagree on dismissing Trump as a mere demagogue bluffer, or appeasing him when he actually threatens. Fascists only get emboldened by appeasement. And we in North America are his first and most deliberate target. We better have a better strategy than to cede and capitulate just to get along with him and his aggressive imperialists.
I recently wrote an essay on ”The Crisis of American Democracy and the Rise of the MAGA Neo-fascist Project" - which you may access at my website: gonzalo-santos.com; this is the sole paragraph I devoted to the question of the dire consequences of Trump's reelection for North America:
"Internationally, the U.S. under Trump 2.0 will certainly deepen the chaos in world governance and exacerbate geopolitical and economic tensions. A retrenchment to mercantilist/protectionist policies and tariffs will only isolate the U.S. further from the world economy, to the benefit of the emerging center of gravity of the world-economy in East Asia, centered on China. In contrast, the North American region will fragment under the weight of immigrant expulsions and attacks on the U.S. Latino ethnic diasporas, the imposition of onerous tariffs on neighboring countries, and the threats of U.S. military interventionism." [Emphasis added]
Now, we see that Trump has already dispensed with niceties and pre-empted any approaching charade of "consultations" with the Mexican envoys by issuing his non-negotiable ultimatum. He does NOT grant Mexico and Canada the status of “equal partners" and “closest allies". They are, in his mind, vassals who need to be "brought to heel" and made to obey and execute his demands -- using tariffs as the hammer to make them comply, even if that violates the nostrums of neoliberal policy, which he started violating in this first term and now even Biden is flagrantly violating vis-a-vis China and other trading partners.
What has Trump unilaterally decreed, even before he takes office? Well, that the new Mexican administration should:
(1) “Shut down completely” the migrant flows coming up north to the U.S.-Mexico border, immediately and at their expense - just like he forced AMLO to do with his entire Guardia Nacional in 2019/20 (and Biden got AMLO to repeat the feat, albeit more diplomatically, in 2024). Mexico was exposed as a vassal state; and
(2) “Stop all flows of drugs “- especially Fentanyl - from entering the U.S. Now, this is a grave problem for the U.S. and its huge demand for drugs, that no one has been able to solve since Richard Nixon declared his "War on Drugs". No matter. High tariffs to Mexico until and unless they stop, on the supply side, the flow of “all drugs.” And what about the insaciable demand side? Or the role of Big Pharma in creating the opioid epidemic, which directly led to the rise in demand for Fentanyl?
This tried and failed approach to both the broken migration regime in North America and the drug crisis in the U.S. is sure to generate enormous economic and geopolitical chaos and tensions up there, on both sides of the border, among the titans and gods of Olympus - among business groups and political elites. The massive deportation campaign will only generate harsh state persecutions and unrestrained violent vigilantism that will generate, in turn, massive collective social resistance. Social chaos and conflict will also ensue.
The sooner the entire political class in Mexico rid themselves of their stupor and the incredulity that has clouded their vision and paralyzed them from taking preparatory actions to resist the onslaught that is coming, the better. The same goes for the entire civil society in both Mexico and in the Mexican diaspora - as well as among other Latin American diasporas and their Latin American homelands. At the top, CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, need to get involved (forget the OAS). And at the grassroots, a new Frente Transnacional de Resistencia Migrante needs to come into being.
As for the Canada tariffs (no mass deportations there, just more effective interception of growing irregular flows of Indian and other Asian immigrants), that's somewhat of an enigma, which we will not address, but which will surely mess things up for U.S.-Canada relations.
In Mexico, nothing less than a national alliance between the Mexican government (at all levels), political parties, mass media, and civil society community-based organizations, on the one side, and all immigrant-advocacy organizations in Mexico and their equivalent in the Mexican diaspora in the United States, on the other, need to be immediately called into being, organized, and mobilized. Mexico has had experience with that, as when President Lázaro Cárdenas called on all Mexicans to support the expropriation of the vast foreign holding in petroleum in the 1930s. The Mexican people responded then, and it will respond now.
But Mexico has also had, sadly, a long experience with being pushed around on immigration - and sad to say, taking it with a minimum of resistance: The U.S. repatriation campaign immediately after WWI, the repatriation campaign upon the Great Depression starting, the Operation Wetback in the mid-1950s, and the recent massive immigrant criminalization/detention/deportation/border militarization campaigns under presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. They all happened without the Mexican government responding forcefully in the least. Especially in the past 4 decades of neoliberal governments, it has shamefully looked the other way and abandoned the Mexican diaspora to its fate at the hands of evermore anti-immigrant policies by both parties of the U.S. duopoly, while “thanking” the migrants for their remittances.
In truth, Mexico - government and society - abandoned the defense of its diaspora in the United States for decades. It cannot continue to do so under present circumstances. The very failure of U.S. bipartisan, draconian, and restrictionist immigration policies over the past 4 decades has SPILLED OVER the cozy, free-trade anchored plan for the fast-track neoliberal economic integration of the North American region.
An analytic pause is in order, to remember that it was Carlos Salinas de Gortari and George Bush, Sr., who set aside the topic of the mobility of labor - labor migration - when they negotiated the terms for the mobility of capital, commerce, finance, investment, and all other aspects of North American capitalist integration. That was by mutual accord. And it was a time bomb, which in due time, blew up in the faces of the 3 countries' business and political elites championing NAFTA, and later T-MEC.
On the side of the negatively affected Mexican working classes made "superfluous" by the new integration project, the survival response was massive new out-migration irregular labor flows to fill the labor demands of the U.S.. But as these flows were unauthorized and irregular, the issue of undocumented immigration exploded in the U.S. media and politics. This was further complicated by the new refugee migration flows desperately leaving the Northern Triangle failed states of Central America, and subsequently from other states with severe crises, such as Haiti, Venezuela, and Cuba.
On the U.S. side, the white working and middle classes - who suffered the brunt of the neoliberal corporate offshoring globalization project - were made to feel threatened and displaced by a jingoistic mass media and the Republican Party, regarding not just the new immigration waves but the socioeconomic advances of the domestic non-white panethnicities since the 1960s - Latinos, Blacks, Asians. But above all others, Mexican immigrants and Central American refugees, and Muslim immigrants were made to be the new "national security threat" in the post-9/11 years. The huge,mostly-white backlash against BOTH Mexican and Latin American immigrants AND the ideal of a multiracial, multicultural society, visible in the Tea Party Movement of the Obama years, has led to the rise of the MAGA Neo-Fascist Project of today.
To resist this project, we repeat, a Transnational Migrant Resistance Front is now urgently needed to be formed and coordinated on all sides of all borders in the region, but most specially on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico region between the Mexican people in Mexico and the Mexican diaspora in the U.S.
Diplomatically, a firm and resolute Mexican government call to all governments in the region that will be impacted by the massive deportations and the high tariffs should immediately be issued, a robust international front of diplomatic resistance needs to be forged.
In the absence of such things at the top and at the grassroots of our regios, North America's current trend towards fragmentation and chaos will only continue to spread and deepen economically, geopolitically, and socially.
The MAGA Neo-Fascist Project will either unite us all in resistance or it will bring us all disastrous consequences. The choice is ours and that of our leaders.
No time to lose! Everybody to their appointed trenches!
Resistamos unidos con nuestras diásporas, pueblos y gobiernos de Nuestra América! ¡No Pasarán!
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