Simple. To Canada, or the Bahamas, or to the Cayman Islands, or the UK, or France, or wherever. Whose agents then can easily wire the money to Mexico. Heck, I know a couple of Canadians who would be happy to facilitate money transfers to Mexico, and who would love to take a smaller commission than any percentage-tax the US might levy, in exchange for the business they’d get. Note that that is a commission to them, not the government of the United States.
The only way Trump can “make Mexico pay for the wall” is to tax all money leaving the United States. Somehow, I don’t think Americans would like that.
My guess is that the plan is to have people that crossed illegally either deleted or they can stay and build the wall by will be paid less than Americans would be paid. This of course would have terrible optics, but Trump is blind to everything.
That description reminded me of something, and it took me a minute to figure out what: the Easter Islanders building Moai. And the wall will represent the same thing–the last gasps of a dying civilization.
From his most recent comments, apparently payment for the wall may come in the form of some complex language during negotiations with Mexico, which I guess he assumes, they’ll be too dumb to notice. They’ll pay for it without knowing it!
If taxing money sent to Mexico is to be counted as Mexico paying for the wall, will revenue Mexico raises in its own retaliatory measures be subtracted from the figure? It’s not like they never have a chance to tax Americans. There are maybe a million Americans who live in Mexico and a bunch more who visit. What happens if Mexico’s wall taxes generate more revenue than ours? Won’t that mean we, effectively, paid even more for the wall?
A good chunk of the money Trump can unilaterally defund would also be counterproductive to defund.
The optics of cutting off counterterrorism money and then having a terrorist attack on that city would be pretty bad. Cutting funding for police officers and prosecutors would be about as bad.
Regarding taxing money transfers. You can’t single out Mexico. It won’t work. The money will just leave the US via another country.
If you tax all transfers out of the US, then there is going to be an enormous number of consequences. Why should people sending money to Germany have to pay for Trump’s linear pyramid?
There’s an immense amount of stupidity regarding “Mexico will pay for it.”
Yes, altho the levy will start the cash flow for the wall, the idea of a huge wall is ridiculous. Mind you, some improvements on it to stop the flow of drugs is likely a good idea.
But Trump canstart his wall. He will be able to* say* “Mexico is paying for it”.
There is no reason Mexico would be required to exactly mirror whatever legislation was passed in the U.S.
But at the end of the day, Mexico is not a completely functionless country that depends on remittances even though it is important to some poor sections of the population. It’s got a GDP of $1.3 trillion. Even a 5% tax on remittances wouldn’t necessarily be worth going full trade war.
But a large number of them come through Mexico. The recently cancelled “wet foot/dry foot” policy wasn’t exactly a beloved policy for the Mexican government because it encouraged Cubans to illegally enter Mexico to get to the states, for example.
Carlos goes to the local Envio Dinero establishment, pays them their fee, and tells them he wants to send $300 to Miguel in Guanajuato. Does Carlos know or care of the local money broker sends it by way of Gujarat?
(As noted above, there are 30,000 registered money transfer businesses and plenty that aren’t. Monitoring, investigating, and shutting down all the ones that evade regulations costs money and time.)