Yes, it does matter. Maybe the USA should share our wealth with the world, and everyone here will be below our poverty standards. Are you for that?
Mexico should take care of its own. I’m fine with legal immigration or work permits, but not fine with illegals who commit 3.5 times more crimes than Americans do, and put a drain on our budgets which were paid by USA citizens, and supposed to support USA citizens, not illegals.
What fraction or percentage of immigrants is that, by the way? I’m sure you have some supporting information here, because otherwise this is just made up shit, and that ain’t no kind of debate.
Let’s not leave out a critical part of that Politifact link
The fact that most of Mexico’s exports go to the US is a very good reason why they don’t want the wall. Building the wall would trash their economy far worse than any tariff could, even if they could do it for free. Trump is basically giving Mexico the choice of “Do nothing, or pay me a lot of money and I’ll beat you up”, and it’s obvious which option Mexico is going to choose. Well, obvious at least to anyone who has any clue how to perform a negotiation or settle a deal.
And even if we accept the dubious notion that illegal immigration costs us money on net, the solution to that is to end illegal immigration. Let people in legally, and it won’t be illegal any more.
We do let people in legally. We just don’t have open borders.
Then that’s nothing but rearranging words. It would be like a mayor classifying numerous crimes as non-criminal, then taking credit for “reducing the city’s crime rate.”
Eh, why not? New York City has a $15 admission fee…
Shrug. You seem to care about this a lot more than I do.
Of course they will.
Five percent matters. Five percent across millions of people is a huge deal. (what makes you think it’s only on cheap goods? Expensive things are made out of steel and aluminum. Have you ever heard of cars?) It’s far more than the much-ballyhooed tax cut and yet Trumpists love that.
The thing is that such things don’t land evenly on everyone. Some people won’t be affected very much. Some will lose everything. As it happens I used to work with a company in Ohio with about 200 employees; their steel, a major input into their product, was largely sourced from Canada. Thanks to the steel tariff their costs just shot up and there is no American replacement, because the chemistry they need can only be provided by their Canadian supplier and the U.S. option is expensive anyway. So they’re out a million or two, and according to the GM there, will have to lay off 15 or 20 guys as they shut down a few product lines. So there’s 15-20 people out of work and 15-20 families on the edge, and that’s ONE company. Multiply that by thousands.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. You raise costs on yourself, you suffer; handwaving it away is just fooling yourself.
You did post a number that appears to be a ridiculous fiction. That has nothing to do with tariffs, anyway.
Any Mexican politician who offers to pay for the wall will be impeached, and will be lucky to not be beaten up in the streets.
While I think the wall is a stupid idea, Mexico’s motivation could be trade. Part of the new NAFTA could be built the wall, don’t build it and no trade for you.
And yes ALL corporate tax, tariffs, etc are paid by the consumer, it just sounds better and a politician say, you’re not paying for it some evil corp is.
What will this supposed wall do? Reduce illegal immigration? Since 2007, the majority of illegal immigrants are from over staying visas and the percentage is growing. Illegal immigrants by visa overstay were 42% of the population by 2014. 2/3rds (66%) of new illegals in 2014 came by visa overstay.
What will this supposed wall do? Net immigration through the Mexican border with the US has been near or zero since 2016; and is trending negative.
What will this supposed wall do? Enrich shady contractors with political ties to Drump?
I’m going to go with the third position above.
The people who want the wall have no conception of its enormous cost to the nation in land, resources, and economic opportunity. Many of them will never go to the border.
So, you lie. You take a picture of a wall somewhere, maybe in Minecraft, say it’s at “the border” and declare mission accomplished. If someone challenges you that it doesn’t actually extend all the way from the Pacific to the Gulf, just point out that they haven’t walked the whole length of that themselves. If this troll logic doesn’t work, and they say they haven’t seen it anywhere on the “actual border,” just point out that the desert is a big place and they must have missed it.
It’s even easier if you can just blame the Democrats.
Convince frightened bigots to vote for Donald Trump.
Do you have a cite for this figure? I don’t think it’s correct.
Canada and Mexico both send 85% or more of their exports to the USA.
Those numbers are for 2003 and I can’t find the source material they claim they used; is there another, more recent cite for this number?
This cite seems to indicate that Mexico’s total exports for 2016 totaled $879B. $302B of that went to the US. That isn’t 85% of their exports, it’s more like 34% of their exports.
I was just looking at that. Something is wrong with that site somewhere, because when you visualize the data, it shows 81% of exports to the US.
Maybe someone else can come up with a better cite, but that’s the best I found. /shrug
ETA: My point is that the arguments being presented by Silver lining (and Velocity, in his attempt to provide a cite) seem kind of janky to me. If the figures presented are not accurate, why should I give any import to the rest of the argument? If the figures back up the assertion, then I’ll gladly take the new information into account, of course, but I would like to see those numbers.