As noted earlier in this thread, the vast majority of the aid we “give” to Mexico is devoted to purposes that are directly important to the US, such as fighting illegal drug trafficking. Withdrawing that funding would just be cutting off our own nose to spite Mexico’s face.
And as Stranger pointed out, the chief reason that Mexico sends us most of their exports is because of the advantageous terms established by the North American FREE Trade Agreement or NAFTA. If the US pigheadedly insists on imposing tariffs on Mexican goods, contrary to the intent of NAFTA, then Mexico will no longer have a financial incentive to send most of their goods to us rather than elsewhere. They don’t “need” us as a primary trade partner if we’re not giving them a better deal than they can get from somebody else.
And $5 billion is just a down payment. All it gets you is a half finished project. If you are considering the amount of tariffs you’d need to extract the cost, you ought to factor in the total cost, in addition to reconsidering who would be most impacted by that tariff.
You seem to have no idea what a tariff (tax) actually is and who pays it. In almost all cases, the importer pays the tariff, so it is a tax on importer/distributors that is generally passed onto the consumer in the guise of higher prices. Mexico won’t pay shit for any wall; the people paying for it are the people whose lifestyle depends on inexpensive goods coming from a cheap labor market.
You are not correct. Every metric and measure of crime by immigrants (documented and undocumented) is lower than by the citizen population by a wide margin. And the crimes that are most typical among undocumented immigrants—domestic violence and other forms of spousal and child abuse—are exacerbated by the unwillingness of undocumented immigrants to cooperate with authorities out of a very legitimate fear of being deported even if they are a victim.
Those exports go to the United States not because they need us but because we need them, hence NAFTA and the replacement United States—Mexico—Canada Agreement (when and if ratified) in order to be able to maintain a consumer lifestyle in which cheap manufactured goods are readily available. If the United States elected to put an onerous tariff on these goods that made the products unappealing to consumers, Mexico could turn around and sell goods to other emerging great economies with consumers looking for inexpensive products and growing labor costs, e.g. China, Korea, et cetera.
You don’t actually seem to know much about the topics of tariffs and trade, and appear resistant to being educated, but if you’d like to know more: the non-partisan Tax Policy Center [URL=What Is A Tariff And Who Pays It? | Tax Policy Center]”What Is A Tariff And Who Pays It?”
US$5B isn’t even half-finished. The costs on a comprehensive sea-to-sea wall are likely something more like US$30B to US$50B, and even then there are going to be areas where creating a permanent physical barrier is going to be extremely challenging. US$5B might not even cover annual surveillance and upkeep. And the reality is that we need immigrants not only for the inexpensive labor they provide but for the young wage earners and taxpayers they create in order to provide a sustainable economy and labor for services where automation is unlikely to significantly replace human effort, e.g. child care, health care, elder care, construction, et cetera.
“Wall” is just a dumb idea that serves as a distraction from getting to the actual work of immigration reform so that we can let in the people that will be real contributors and weed out those few who are trying in some way to game the system or who pose a threat.
A 2% Tariff on mexican goods would mean us Americans pay it. The merchants would simply raise their prices 2%. That’s how tariffs operate in the real economy.
I’m a tad bemused by the notion that Mexico is sending goods (and drugs) into the U.S. just for the hell of it and the U.S. government can charge them a fee for the privilege of doing so. Those items are coming to the U.S. because Americans want them and are willing to buy them, and putting barriers in the way just raises the prices for those Americans.
As others have pointed out, you haven’t grasped what tariffs or for that matter what imports are.
There isn’t a Mexican government store in downtown Las Vegas selling this Mexican owned stuff out of a warehouse.
It is being imported by American businesses, for demand by American consumers. If the tariff is 2% or 200% it’s added to the cost of goods and passed on to the consumer. The other countries exporting to the US will bump up their prices by the equivalent of the tariff as will every US manufacturer.
Every cent of the increased import cost is borne by US consumers. The tariff may cost Mexican exporters but any differential isn’t paid to the US Treasury.
If the tariff is sufficient to make Mexican sourced goods less competitive then (if volumes can’t be placed into other markets) the worst that will happen to Mexico will be falls in factory production and with it wages and employment increasing the socioeconomic incentives to migrate legally or otherwise to the US.
It might is a simple notion that’s easily sold, but it’s counterproductive to both sides of the trade, and worse for the US than Mexico.
I don’t think Trump supporters judge him on what he says on a campaign or cares about fact-checking. They clamor for his vision and results first and foremost. Almost all politicians of stature by the nature of the business have moments when they say something and it doesn’t happen, or they change their initial opinions.
I have never met anyone for illegal immigration or a person that denies the problems that come with it.
Is 5 billion dollars really a lot of money? Obama’s stimulus was somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 billion dollars. Did it build anything? I recall the former President saying there are shovel-ready projects, only to retract it by saying I guess they weren’t so shovel ready. Something like that.
With Trump, if he gets the money approved, I do believe he will build a wall for better border security. The ROI on the wall for the problems with drugs alone would come quickly, overall crime from illegal immigration would go down, and so would human trafficking.
So what’s the problem? I’ll tell you, even though Chuck Schumer was for better border security when Obama was president, I believe Democrats fear that by giving Trump a signature win, he’ll be harder defeat in 2020.
Consumers are not forced to buy anything. Call it a tax, a fee, whatever you wish. 2% for 2 years will not be noticed unless your buying things in bulk
But talking about the real economy, how much of it does the USA government spend for the problems illegal imitation, drug trafficking, crimes, and such. Give me your best guess.
I’d venture to say a 5 billion dollar investment the taxpayers would see an ROI in a few years, so if you want to talk about how much of the taxpayer money goes to welfare to support illegals before sending them home, security, drug rehab, you name it on the above problems, economically speaking building the wall makes sense.
When is someone going to point out the real reason Trump wants the wall?
It’s obvious he gives fuck-all about “border security.” All he is interested in doing is building something he can put his name on.
So far, he has accomplished nothing constructive in his administration. This would be his legacy.
How do Trump supporters even know what his “vision” is without paying attention to what he says? And how do you evaluate his “results” without at least some fact-checking?
I suspect what you really mean is that Trump supporters just enjoy hearing the rhetorical demagoguery he pulls out of his ass and don’t like having their buzz harshed by comparing it to reality.
Do you really need somebody else to look this up for you?
Hey, you know who buys things in bulk? Manufacturers do, and if their costs suddenly jump 2%, they definitely notice and typically respond by laying people off as well as raising prices. End consumers might not notice the price increase, assuming they’re not the ones who got laid off.
Or something else, as usual a lot of what you are relying on was the Republican propaganda against anything the government did to help.
Uh, No. More likely is that like Arpaio did in Arizona by concentrating on ideological things like walls and hunting immigrants for driving around, more pressing needs like hunting rape criminals suffered because of budget priorities that were set that way so as to make the Arizona bigots happy.
Nonsense, considering that thanks to the latest fight about the wall Trump is getting more unpopular in the polls and in the past elections the Democrats won the house also by disparaging the wall.
As Bryan Ekers pointed out, manufacturers and wholesalers do buy things in bulk, and their purchases make up the vast majority of our imports from Mexico.
Only if you “venture” to assume, entirely unrealistically, that a $5B wall would actually be effective in substantially reducing illegal immigration and its costs. Which it would not.
For the nth time: Most of the people known as “illegal immigrants” entered the US LEGALLY. Even a physically effective border wall—which your proposed $5B boondoggle would not be—would have absolutely zero effect on the millions of undocumented residents who originally entered the country on a legally valid visa.
As noted above, it’s a wire fence, not a wall, runs about 2,000 kilometres, not 2,000 miles, and the daily minimum wage in Pakistan is about $3.70 a day. Even doubling that for skilled fence builders is less than $8/day rather than whatever figure you care to plug in for the hourly rate for building the US wall.
Whatever you figure the cost of the US wall might be, what kind of projects would you rather see that money go to? Would it be better invested in education? Usable infrastructure? Health? Awesome wifi connectivity? Businesses that would create sustainable jobs and training? Free beer for everyone?
This speaks very poorly of Trump supporters, if true.
I see no reason to believe any of this is likely to be true. This sounds like magical thinking. The wall would be symbolic, and that’s about it. It would serve as, at most, a very minor challenge in an already-very-difficult journey for those who seek to cross illegally.
The problem is that the Democrats have literally zero incentive to cooperate. Their supporters oppose the wall as a symbol of stupidity and hatred. They were voted into office largely to oppose Trump. The only Americans who strongly support the wall are already in Trump’s camp, and the Democrats have no likelihood of gaining their support. And polling shows that the public is largely blaming this shutdown on Trump. So from a political perspective, the shutdown helps the Democrats and hurts Trump, and capitulating to Trump would hurt the Democrats politically and help Trump.