Border Report Live: Mexico feeling the heat of the Trump presidency
EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) -- U.S. pressure on Mexico has intensified in the past month.
Trump has slapped tariffs on Mexican steel, aluminum, car parts and everything else not covered by a standing free trade agreement, and is pressing Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to fulfill a massive water delivery to the U.S. The U.S. is also tightening regulations on cash transfers on which many Mexican families depend.
Despite high hopes last summer after the election of that country’s first female president, Mexico is also facing its own pressures at home.
Weeks after the election of Sheinbaum, political analysts warned she had walked into a minefield. New social programs were putting a dent in Mexico's national budget; a drug cartel war was beginning to rage in the state of Sinaloa; and the U.S. had elected a president whose priority was to seal the border and deport as many migrants as possible. On top of that, Mexico is seeing declining crude oil production, and some crude shipments being held up in Texas and Louisiana due to high water and salt content.
The current controversy, however, involves television, radio, and online ads that the Department of Homeland Security is running in Mexican media.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem appears in the ads telling migrants in no uncertain words not to come to the U.S. or they will be hunted down and sent back.
The ads went unnoticed at first, but they ran in prime time last Sunday during Mexican league soccer games which are watched by millions and usually draw strong emotions.
Sheinbaum was put in a position to explain to her countrymen why a foreign government was able to tell her people what not to do. She called the ads discriminatory and promised to change the law to ban foreign governments from running ads except for tourism. She also “asked” private television stations to not run the ads.
Meanwhile, the Bank of Mexico is reporting two consecutive months in which remittances – the money Mexicans abroad send home – have fallen. Remittances account for about 4% of Mexico’s GDP and reached a whopping $64.7 billion last year.
Economists have several explanations for what’s going on, and most of them involve the United States.
First, they say U.S. inflation is hitting the pocketbooks of Mexican workers in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. The more they pay at the grocery store or on rent, the less they have to send to relatives back home.
They also point to growing fears about Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in immigrant communities. The chatter is that it is prompting Mexicans in the U.S. illegally to save more in case they are deported. It also may be keeping them from going out too often, which is cutting down on how frequently they send remittances.
A new potential obstacle is a Treasury Department regulation barely going into effect now. It requires money-transfer businesses in several counties in Texas and California to document cash transactions between $200 and $10,000 and require government identification from the sender.
The Treasury says this is to cut down on money laundering by transnational criminal organizations that smuggle drugs from Mexico to the United States, then collect the profits and send it back to cartel leaders.
Advocates fear this will discourage migrants from using these services and further cut down on remittances.
In this week's episode of Border Report Live, we examine the added pressure on Mexico in recent weeks and new rules that could affect Mexico in the near and distant future. Plus, a look ahead as President Trump is about to complete his first 100 days in office. It’s been a rollercoaster ride, with the president sending troops and armored vehicles to the Southwest border and imposing tariffs on trading partners.