Three cheers for President Donald Trump’s tariff threat, which concentrated the minds of Mexico’s leaders on their country’s role in undermining U.S. security, particularly when it comes to illegal immigration. While the illicit drug trade is a more difficult nut to crack, President Claudia Sheinbaum can do much more to prevent illegal migrants going north.
Trump’s team is certainly monitoring the situation by reviewing the numbers of encounters with illegals crossing from Mexico. This data not only includes Mexicans, it also counts third-country nationals who use our southern neighbor’s territory as a staging base to move north. Trump also wants a decrease in narcotics trafficking, but the intelligence on ferreting out and quantifying drug smuggling is a much trickier business than tabulating illegal migrants. Trump’s first message to Sheinbaum is that he expects illegal migrant numbers from Mexico to evaporate and stay down, or he will be right back to talking tariffs. The American national interest deserves nothing less.
Recent U.S. presidents—Bush, Obama, and Biden—always tried to make defending the national interest vis-à-vis Mexico a joint project. That was the reason that Washington and Mexico City invested so much in the failed Merida Plan, which turned out to be another doomed nation-building exercise in Mexico, wasting a decade, countless lives, and billions of U.S. assistance dollars.
The Biden administration’s version of this “we-are-in-this-together” diplomacy with Mexico was the pompously titled “Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities.” Rarely was there less actual security cooperation between the two countries, except that both governments quietly collaborated in managing the flow of unlawful migrants into the United States. Under the terms of this secret dealmaking, Mexico received U.S. assistance funds—which Elon Musk’s DOGE should make public—to modulate the travel of illegals to the border, so that admission numbers stayed only at levels that Biden officials cynically thought they could get away with.
“We-are-in-this-together” diplomacy gives cover for politicians of both governments to escape responsibility, and it served the Washington foreign policy establishment for years to help blunt demands that Mexico do more, particularly in stopping illegal migrants. “We-are-in-this together” diplomacy does not tabulate results, but is all about bilateral “process.” Even more than their U.S. counterparts, Mexican politicians are enamored with process, be it diplomatic, political, or policy—any smokescreen that helps to hide the lack of results.
To his credit, our CEO president does not care two pesos about process. Trump’s tariff threats repudiate the old approach that puts Washington and Mexico City in the same boat. He expects Mexico to act.
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