Secretaries of State and Homeland Security encounter objections to hard U.S. line on deportations
MEXICO CITY—Top U.S. officials arrived for talks here Wednesday to find a defiant Mexican government refusing to accept President Donald Trump’s tougher immigration and deportation policies.
.. “We won’t accept it because we don’t have to,” he added, in an apparent reference to U.S. plans to return illegal migrants to Mexico, regardless of their nationality.
.. Mr. Trump’s new guidelines, which flesh out executive orders signed by the president last month, call for enlisting local U.S. authorities to enforce immigration law, jailing more people pending hearings, and sending border-crossers back to Mexico to await proceedings, even if they aren’t Mexican.U.S. statistics show most of those entering the U.S. illegally through the southwest border are from countries other than Mexico.
.. Of more than 400,000 people apprehended in the year ending Sept. 30, more than 220,000 weren’t from Mexico.. The guidelines issued separately this week suggested the U.S. would seek to have people arriving from countries other than Mexico await their deportation proceedings in Mexico rather than in the U.S. At the end of that process, those people would be returned to their country of origin, officials said... Ahead of the visit, Mexican officials suggested that a U.S. pullout from Nafta would affect all aspects of U.S.-Mexico ties.“Logically, there wouldn’t be incentives to continue collaborating on the issues most important to national security in North America, such as the issue of migration,.. Mexico and the U.S. have collaborated for decades on efforts to fight drug cartels, police the border and prevent terror attacks... Mexican officials want to use issues including national security and migration as leverage for future talks about Nafta, experts said
Trump, Changing Course on Taiwan, Gives China an Upper Hand
By backing down in a telephone call with China’s president on his promise to review the status of Taiwan, President Trump may have averted a confrontation with America’s most powerful rival.
But in doing so, he handed China a victory and sullied his reputation with its leader, Xi Jinping, as a tough negotiator who ought to be feared, analysts said.
“Trump lost his first fight with Xi and he will be looked at as a paper tiger,” said Shi Yinhong
.. Even though many other world leaders had spoken to the new American president by phone since his inauguration on Jan. 20, Mr. Xi had refused to talk to Mr. Trump until he was sure that the American president would give what turned out to be a concession — an affirmation of the One China policy, Mr. Shi said.
.. The tough statements were intended to recall the time in 1995 when China tested missiles near Taiwan, prompting President Bill Clinton to dispatch an aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait, near China’s coast.
President Trump and the Other Countries
Everything is an ongoing negotiation with Trump. Australia and Mexico just had to sleep on the idea that their relationship with the United States is worse today than yesterday. And it sends a signal to other leaders that lecturing President Trump with an eye toward grandstanding or embarrassing him isn’t the strongest strategy. He probably needed to make that point one way or another. That’s done. Now let’s see if the next foreign leader decides to lecture him or not. I’m thinking no.
America Is Already Paying for the Wall With Mexico
Trump now faces a southern neighbor largely united in its anti-U.S. sentiment. This sentiment is not primarily moved by his intention to renegotiate NAFTA; or his racist, anti-Mexican rhetoric; or even by the idea of the wall itself, which anyone who has actually been to the U.S.-Mexico border knows is patently absurd given the topography along the 2,000-odd mile length of the border—not to mention the large swathes of protected or privately owned land there. The sentiment, which led every single political leader in Mexico to demand that President Peña Nieto cancel his trip to Washington, comes from the indignity of the notion that Mexico will somehow pay for the wall.
.. Gratuitously bashing Mexico and Mexican immigrants plays well with Trump’s base, and in his ignorance, he seems to believe he can do it without consequences.
.. As Mexico prepares for a presidential election in 2018, every candidate worth his or her salt will try to outdo the competitors in anti-U.S. posturing. They will promise to expel armed U.S. law-enforcement personnel from Mexico, to legalize drugs, to allow Central American migrants to reach the U.S. border, to stop sharing water with drought-ravaged border states.
.. From an early age, every Mexican is taught that Mexico lost half its territory to its imperialist northern neighbor. Ask any Mexican child and they will name all six “Niños Heroes,” young cadets who died defending Chapultepec castle from the invading U.S. forces in 1847.
.. We will just as soon suffer hardship, or even death, than be submitted to humiliation from the U.S.
.. When Trump attacks Mexico, when he blithely says that Mexico will pay for the wall, he is not pre-conditioning a negotiating counterpart. Instead, he is undoing years of patient diplomacy and riling up a long-dormant Mexican nationalism
.. In essence, Trump is limiting the Mexican president’s range of negotiation, because any concession will now be seen as a sign of weakness, a loss of pride, an attack on our sovereignty.
.. even if both presidents meet and smile and agree to work together, the sentiments of nationalism and mistrust wrought by Trump will permeate throughout the bureaucracy and will be hard to eradicate. Expect less bilateral cooperation in the future, less information-sharing, and less goodwill, all because of Trump’s wall. Mexico would just as soon suffer economic hardship than pay for something so stupid, so offensive, and so useless. If you don’t believe me, go to Mexico and see the monuments we erect to the Niños Heroes for giving up their lives resisting the U.S. invasion.