And the wall itself would also have the effect of severely suppressing all of that economic activity. This is like “Go buy yourself a gun and shoot yourself in the face with it, or I’ll shoot you in the face”.
Perhaps Anglo-Americans are unaware the activities of these drug cartel thugs. One never hears of some gang descending on a small rural village in Iowa, snatching up the young pretty girls and riding off with them, the girls never heard from again. Well, there’s a very good chance the fathers of these young girls owns a gun, and thugs do not like being shot at.
In Mexico and many other Latin-American countries it’s different, these small rural villages generally do not have such wide-spread gun ownership. Thugs know they’re descending on defenseless villages and can do as they will, no worry about getting shot at. The local police are on the drug cartel’s payroll, they won’t interfere.
Sure, there’s economic advantage in coming to the USA, but there’s also the part about fleeing uncontrolled violence. If you think Mexicans hate Mexico, you’d be wrong; it’s just one hell of a lot safer in the United States.
– “Guatemala: a tiny country with a big crime problem”, Global Post, May 23, 2011
The OP asks whether Mexico could be coerced into building the wall … well, threatening to send a hundred million handguns across the border is one way.
I am Mexican. I own a gun. Many friends and relatives do also. Cartels could give a damn.
Good point. I should’ve remembered that from my South Park class.
Uh–maybe you should look at a map. You think that Mexico and Guatemala are the same country. Of course, they’re not, and they have two very different societies, economies, political situations, etc.
And if you think that Mexican cartels don’t “descend on a small rural village in Iowa” simply because the people own guns–well…geeze, I’m not going to even bother.
That’s always where I thought he got the idea. Recent stats put the amount of remittances to Mexico exceeding US$2B per month. Slap a 10% tax on any remittances heading to Mexico from the US and financing construction would become much easier AND Trump could assert that he ‘made’ Mexico pay for it.
This assumes, of course, that Trump thought it out at all.
He can’t, and it’s fucking stupid to think he could.
Next topic.
Well thats what I mean. Mexico gets all this income yet doesnt have to build a single road, school, sewage treatment plant, or any other infrastructure to handle all these people nor do they have to pay all their welfare benefits, their healthcare, or pay to educate their children. BUT the US has to. Heck even here in Overland Park Kansas when I go to register my son for school the school has to have a Spanish interpreter and many of the children being enrolled have no documents (meaning illegals). yet my tax dollars have to pay for their kids education.
And that is exactly what Mexico wants. They want to do nothing about their poverty. Their only plan is to tell their young people to move to the US BUT send money home. This is the plan put out years ago for former Mexican Presidente Vincent Fox.
The money is not going to Mexico. It’s going to family members.
Sure they will. They go up against the Mexican army with reasonable success, but they will quake in their boots at the prospect of a few poor Mexicans with guns. And why would they stick around again?
As for the cartels getting the guns - who didn’t like freebies. Five cartel members with heavy weapons can take anything they want.
Or are the Mexicans all going to go John Wayne on us?
Dude, why don’t you go up against the cartels then? What’s wrong with you?
I know what is wrong with you - you aren’t an idiot. 
I think watchwolf49 has been watching too many five guys with guns and a pickup truck defeat the entire Cuban army movies.
Some people think The Magnificent Seven or The Three Amigos are documentaries about modern Mexico.
SSSSHHHHH! There’s such a thing as Google, you know. What if Trump is doing a vanity search - you want he should get more “ideas”?
The wall isn’t actually that expensive in terms of government programs/boondoggles (I think we were spending $12bn a MONTH at one point in Iraq, as an example.) So Mexico could pay for it pretty easily, and there’s probably a lot of viable ways a President Trump could do something that would enable him to somewhat credibly claim he made Mexico pay for the wall.
Taxing remittances is one example already mentioned. The biggest issue with that would be actually doing the collections. One article I read said it wouldn’t be that straightforward and it’s hard to know for sure if a transfer is really a remittance or maybe something else. Plus financial firms will hate it. Plus it’ll push more money into cash remittances, which are already a sizable portion of remittances as is.
But it’s at least somewhat viable a plan.
Other simple options would be something like a tariff (we’d have to unilaterally break out of NAFTA for that, unless we found some convoluted way to justify it under the free trade agreement).
The real issue is Mexico will take any of these efforts as a blow to national pride, and they will just do something retaliatory in a like amount. So if we collect $25bn in tariffs, they’ll do the same for U.S. goods going into Mexico. Trump could then claim he got Mexico to pay for the wall, but U.S. manufacturers that import into Mexico wouldn’t be too thrilled.
Illegal immigrants typically have social security and medicare taxes (along with any income tax withholding) deducted from their paycheck (along with employer contributions), that they will never get back. They pay sales tax on their purchases, their rent payments feed into property taxes. TL;DR — you’ve been drinking the Lying Trumpist Kool-aid.
Economists who’ve studied the matter believe that illegal immigrants have a positive effect on the American economy, helping all sectors except, possibly, those at the very bottom of the wage scale. And minimum wage hikes might help there, though — anyone want to bet? — I’ll guess Mr. Redneck opposes that.
I don’t know whether taxing remittances might not breach some international obligations? Is the WTO at all concerned with the free flow of capital? Increasingly, you can send your money freely from one country to another. I realise that states do impose sanctions which can prevent this, but is there any control or restriction on a state’s ability to do this? It’s one thing to impose sanctions on (say) Iraq for failing to comply with its obligations regarding chemical weapons or on Iran for failing to comply with its obligations regarding nuclear proliferation; it’s another to impose sanctions on Mexico quite openly as a revenue-raising measure to fund your own policy regarding border security.
Does any doper know whether Trump’s suggestion would breach any of the US’s obligations under treaties dealing with free trade, or the free movement of capital?
Other objections, of course, are political. Is Trump seriously proposing to tax money remitted to Mexico, but not money remitted to the Cayman Islands or other tax havens? Is Trump seriously suggesting that the US’s border protection policies need to be funded by Mexico - that the US is the kind of banana republic that can’t even fund the protection of its own sovereignty? Etc, etc.
There may also be practical objections. If a remittance to Mexico attracts tax, why don’t I remit the money to a trusted party in some third country, who will then remit it, per my instructions, to Mexico. There are lots of people in the the Cayman Islands who will do this for a modest fee, but immigrant networks tend to have the kind of connections that can get it done, informally but effectively, for an even more modest cost.
Say you shut the car factories down in Mexico as part of this plan. You can’t pop a new one up in the US the way you can move a crap table to another room. Suppliers to the Mexican plant, many of whom are in the US would suffer, the suppliers would to bankrupt, dealers without enough inventory would have to lay people off. Ditto massive tariffs on Apple products made in China.
He’d have to build a wall around the White House, otherwise the people whose lives he would trash might drag him out and tar and feather him.
I think there are more actual biologists who are creationists than economists who think Trump has a clue.
Perhaps you are thinking of the historical example of Los Pepes, the resistance movement in Colombia that helped bring down Pablo Escobar. But that was less a popular resistance and more rival cartels who wished to take over. So it goes.
Think about it for a moment. Someone comes up to you and tells you where the local drug cartel is operating. They offer you a fully loaded pistol and tell you it’s murder time fun time. Do you take the pistol and go attack the gangs on their own turf? Or do you tell the person offering you the gun that you are not crazy and you’d prefer to continue drawing breath?
In dealing with this in the past, “derecho a poseer” was pretty straight forward for my in-laws, but “derecho a portar” was severely limited, so wouldn’t the general assumption on the street be that you’re unarmed?
That, and you live in Guadalajara, don’t you? While the cartels are operating everywhere, I’ve only ever heard one or two random stories of narco-related events in Jalisco.
Yes, and I think that’s Trumps idea. It’s simple, it’s legal and it will work. Honestly we should have done it before.
Now, this puts aside whether or not such a wall is a good idea or will work.