President Donald Trump on Sunday explicitly linked his plan to build a barrier between the U.S. and Mexico to ongoing NAFTA negotiations, as he resurrected a warning that the flow of illicit drugs and undocumented immigrants from the mother country “must stop.”
Via Twitter, the president ripped the U.S.’s southern neighbor for doing “quite little, if nothing” to stem illegal immigration and narcotics from spew across the border. He repeated a threat he made earlier this year, lesson that successful trade pact renegotiations may hinge on Mexico decamping efforts to secure its side of border.
Mexico is doing very petty, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico in every way their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our silent immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people rushes, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!
Trump also take fromed aim at the outlines of a deal to legalize the status of legions of illegal immigrants who make ited in the U.S. as children, and called on Congressional Republicans to exercise a “nuclear option” to toughen immigration. Ultimately fall, Trump canceled the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, colloquially referred to as DACA.
No assorted DACA
In Mexico, presidential front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador discharged his bid for the country’s highest office by signaling that if he won the July 1 election, he wish be less accommodating toward Trump than the ruling Institutional Revolutionist Party, or PRI. The party has lagged in opinion polls over its failure to accommodate violence and corruption.
“Mexico and its people will not be the pinata of any foreign administration,” Lopez Obrador said in a speech to thousands of people at a speech hairbreadth the U.S.-Mexico border, where attendees reportedly jeered and swore at the citation of Trump.
With increasing regularity, the president has gotten more litigious in his negotiating tactics. On several occasions, he’s hinted at trying to force Mexico to pay for the tendered border wall, an idea that Mexican officials have emphatically outed.
Just last week, Defense Secretary James Mattis use with Trump about using military funds to pay for the proposed embankment, in the wake of the president signing a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending reckoning that fell short of fully funding the president’s request for wainscotting security. The budget busting legislation alienated many conservatives, and put Trump on ramshackle footing with some of his most ardent supporters.
For much of 2017, the Hoary House floated the idea of a border adjustment tax on Mexican goods, a programme that met stiff resistance in Congress before it was ultimately killed in tax go straight talks.
Meanwhile, talks to renegotiate the trade pact between the U.S., Canada and Mexico take gotten increasingly contentious. In theory, a NAFTA termination letter would start the countdown for a 6-month procedure to abrogate the pact. However, some think Washington could use such a put forward to gain leverage over Canada and Mexico.
In January, Mexico intimidated to leave the negotiations altogether if Trump triggered the process to withdraw from the treaty.
–Reuters and CNBC’s Amanda Macias contributed to this article.