Chaos at the Border

As the President temporarily closed the U.S./Mexican border, swarms of frustrated wannabee immigrants, the early arrivals from the legendary caravan that no one, including Mexico, seems to want, split away from the San Ysidro Port of Entry and started to cross at nearby crossable points.  Tear gas and arrests followed. A mess. The notion that American statutes should allow immigrants crossing anywhere to ask for asylum has been relegated to the federal courts.

“When President Trump issued yet another ultimatum to Mexico to stop a caravan of would-be refugees early Monday [11/26], he coupled it with an ominous threat: ‘We will close the Border permanently if need be. Congress, fund the WALL!’

“In Torrance, Karen Quintana, president of the Los Angeles Customs Brokers and Freight Forwarders Assn., was perplexed. ‘He can’t mean trade as well,’ she said. ‘He just meant people, right?’… But the prospect that a border shutdown might halt goods crossing the border — and not just immigrants, a frequent target of Trump’s ire — was not unthinkable. ‘You have to take it seriously,” said Quintana… Closing the border between California and Mexico at the peak of the Christmas season would create chaos, Quintana and others said.

“It wasn’t the first time Trump had threatened a border shutdown. In October, as the caravan approached, he suggested he might use U.S. troops to do it. After a five-hour closure at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on Sunday [11/25], when several hundred migrants rushed the border, the possibility seemed more real… Trump’s tweet left unanswered questions, including whether the president was threatening to close the border just at San Ysidro, or across the entire 1,954-mile expanse, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Mexico is California’s biggest export market, purchasing at least $26.7 billion, or 15.6%, of the Golden State’s exports last year. And that understates the actual amount, said Jock O’Connell, a trade expert at Los Angeles consulting firm Beacon Economics. A substantial portion of California’s exports are transshipped to Mexico through Texas, and therefore are counted as Texas exports.

“The San Diego customs district, which includes the San Ysidro Port of Entry, where the caravan of would-be refugees is gathered, accounts for 12.1% of all U.S. imports from Mexico, including aerospace components and avocados. The amount of Mexican imports that remains in California, as opposed to being shipped through to other states, is unknown, O’Connell said.

“‘Mexico is our largest trading partner,’ said O’Connell, one of the state’s foremost trade experts. ‘The economies of the U.S., Canada and Mexico are tightly integrated.’ Closing the Mexico border, he said, would amount to ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face.’… Even a temporary closure, as happened Sunday in San Diego, can wreak havoc.

“‘We have a shared workforce,’ said Paola Avila, vice president of international business affairs at the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce. ‘Some industries report that half their workforce crosses the border: construction, restaurants, hospitality, convention center.... It’s very difficult as a business to be nimble if you lose half of your workforce in one day.’” Los Angeles Times, November 27^th.  But what a great opportunity for Trump to slaughter his least favorite state in the union: California, the state that decimated the GOP candidates in the November 6^th mid-term elections. Just might be too good an opportunity to miss. But: Mexico is our largest trading partner; could he possibly mean the entire border?  Or just the one in California

Trump is still reeling from the announcement of massive layoffs from General Motors, adapting to changing consumer tastes and reacting to Mr. Trump’s exceptionally costly tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Can Mr. “job creator” Trump afford both a stagnant stock market and rising unemployment as he heads into the new year? Does it matter? The next election is not quite two years away. Hit California and spare the rest of the border states?

Mexico has tried to contain the hordes in the caravan; they don’t like the problem any more than we do. Most of the folks trying to cross the border are from Central America anyway. They are not Mexicans! Mexico tried to stop them on their southern border earlier, but they swarmed across.

But Donald Trump wants to make this “Mexico’s problem.” So if they don’t do his bidding… What is Mexico’s response? “The Mexican government says it will award President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner the highest honor the country gives to foreigners, the Order of the Aztec Eagle.

“The Foreign Relations Department said Kushner earned the award ‘for his significant contributions in achieving the renegotiation of the new (trade) agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada.’” Associated Press, November 27^th.

That virtually all of the heavy lifting in the reboot of what used to be NAFTA was carried by U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, seems to have be lost in translation as Mexico is trying to appease Trump over a situation that they really cannot directly control. So much pain. So very, very expensive for us. The United States is increasingly an international pariah. We didn’t have these problems under Republican President George W Bush or Democratic President Barrack Obama.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and all I see is arrogance, cruelty, suffering and hundreds of millions of wasted dollars on border control and potentially billions and billions of waste on a wall we don’t really need and that will not serve our national interests.