Tariffs Are a Bad Response to an Imaginary Border Crisis - Mark Weisbrot

Tariffs Are a Bad Response to an Imaginary Border Crisis –

Donald Trump won the presidency–despite losing the popular
vote by 2.8 million—with a campaign that careened wildly from one distraction
to another. He has clung to this as a Twitter and governing strategy ever
since. As there are 190 countries in the world, and the
United States trades with most of them, trade wars so far have provided a
shovel-ready supply of such diversions. So, here we are: Last Thursday, just in
time to distract from the more potentially violent foreign ventures that are
not going very well (Iran, Venezuela), Trump announced plans for a new set of
tariffs against Mexico.

This trade war is different from other trade wars: It’s not
about trade. It’s not even about “trade” in the expanded, grossly misleading
but commonly used definition that includes the intellectual property and
investors’ “rights” that Trump is fighting
for against China. It’s just Trump telling Mexico that they must stop the
flow of migrants across our southern border or he will impose a 5 percent
tariff beginning June 10 and increasing to 25 percent by October.

Unsurprisingly, this strategy has met with an unusual level
of resistance from Republicans in Congress, as well as from other allies with
deep pockets and money to lose if the war escalates, such as the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce and Business Roundtable. Late Tuesday, after the president told Republicans that they would be “foolish” to try to stop him, The New York Times reported that Republican Senators have warned the White House they could “muster an overwhelming majority to beat back the tariffs.” So it’s not clear yet whether this plan will actually take effect.

Still, it’s worth looking at the underlying reality of the
“border crisis” that Trump has labelled a “national emergency” and which the
tariffs purport to address—as well as how tariffs would actually affect that
reality.

The most up-to-date measure that we have of migrants
crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico without authorization is the
Custom and Border Protection’s “apprehensions/inadmissibles.” Over the past
five years (fiscal years 2014 to 2018) this number has actually fallen, with
2017 apprehensions hitting nearly half-century lows. In 2018,
apprehensions/inadmissibles went up, but were still well below the level of
2014. The number of unauthorized Southwestern border crossings, meanwhile, for
any of these years (between 416,000 and 569,000) is just a fraction of the 1.6
million that crossed the border from Mexico in 2000.

Contrary to Trump’s repeated histrionics, which tend to
encourage the racist fears and animosities of an important part of his
political base, the only surge in southwestern border migration has been for
the last three months (February to April), with an average of 96,500, versus
60,500 for the prior three months. Three months is not nearly enough to
establish that there is a change in the long-term trend. The three-month surge
has not been well-explained, and could be temporary. Some reasons
offered by researchers: some is seasonal, due to spring weather; some is due to
lowered transport costs, with fees charged by ”coyotes”— smugglers who
specialize in bringing migrants to the U.S.—particularly for families with
children; some is paradoxically due to Trump’s threats and hostility, leading
some potential migrants to fear that it’s “now or never.”

If we investigate the reasons for the non-crisis flow of
migrants from the south, and specifically the so-called Northern Triangle
countries and Mexico, where these migrants come from, it turns out that much of
it is due to the damage caused by U.S. foreign policy. In 2009, President Mel
Zelaya of Honduras, a social democrat who had overseen some social and economic
progress since taking office in 2006, was
overthrown by the military in a coup that was consolidated with help from the
United States. Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time, wrote
in her memoirs that she worked successfully to prevent
the democratically elected president from returning to office.

In the years following the 2009 coup, Honduras became the most
dangerous country in the world for environmental and human rights
activists. In 2016 this was brought to world attention when Berta Caceres, a
renowned indigenous rights and environmental activist, and winner of the
Goldman environmental prize, was assassinated. In 2017 Honduran President Juan
Orlando Hernández, whose party won an election of questionable legitimacy
following the 2009 coup, was “re-elected” with a vote count that was
transparently fraudulent.

U.S. involvement in Guatemala has been much more violent,
all the way back to the CIA-led overthrow
of another social democratic president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in 1954. Over the
following decades, a succession of U.S.-backed dictatorships would kill more
than 200,000 people, more than 80 percent of whom were Mayan Indians, in a long
series of horrific atrocities that the UN would later find
to be genocide. President Bill Clinton apologized in 1999 for the US role in the
genocide, which involved considerable material and political support from the
United States.

In El Salvador, the U.S. provided funds, training and
support to governments and military forces linked to death squads that murdered
tens of thousands of civilians from 1978 to 1992. In the early 1980s, El
Salvador was the third largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world, after Israel
and Egypt.

Is it any wonder that these three countries continue to have
the highest homicide rates in the world, given these histories of violence? Or
that they would provide the vast majority of migrants seeking to cross the
Southwestern border of the U.S.? In the Salvadoran case, this has turned into a
vicious feedback loop. Some of the young men who migrated to the U.S. in the
1980s and 90s following the civil war ended up in gangs (MS-13 and Barrio 18)
in Los Angeles, but were forced to return home when President Clinton let their
Temporary Protected Status expire. Two of the gangs they formed with their U.S.
and Salvadoran-acquired skills are now the largest
employers in the country, as they extort millions of people and contribute to
the country’s widespread violence, triggering new migration flows in turn.

Washington’s nefarious War on Drugs, meanwhile, remains a
cesspit of violence and U.S.-sponsored militarization that brings misery to those
countries unfortunate enough to be located between the Colombian and Pervuian cocaine
producers and U.S. consumers. If trafficking is reduced through U.S.-sponsored state
violence in Mexico, it just contributes to more of both in Central America. A
careful econometric study recently found that violence is about as important as
long-term economic factors in explaining the number of unaccompanied children
from Central America showing up at the United States’ southwestern border.

U.S. intervention that generates violence isn’t the only way
that our government has boosted the supply of migrants from the south.
Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. and institutions that it controls—in
particular the IMF—were involved in re-making Mexican economic policy and
institutions with a set of neoliberal reforms. One of the main effects, and
indeed purposes, of instituting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
in 1994 was to lock these policies into an international treaty. Unfortunately,
these economic policies have been a terrible failure
for Mexico.

If Mexico had grown at the same rate post-1980 as it did in
the two decades before, Mexicans would have European living standards today,
and few Mexicans or Central American migrants who arrived in Mexico would have
much interest in trying to enter the United States. From 1960 to 1980, income
per person in Mexico nearly doubled. From 1980 to 2000, however, it grew by a
total of just 13 percent. Today, the national poverty rate is higher than it
was when NAFTA was passed. As with the cases of Guatemala, Honduras, and El
Salvador, it’s worth remembering that countries’ economic growth rates and
stability cannot be attributed to just one cause. Still, it’s interesting to
think about how many fewer migrants might be headed toward the U.S. border if Washington
had simply refrained from intervening in these countries.

Now, the pattern of counterproductive and harmful U.S.
measures is repeating itself. Trump’s threatened tariffs on Mexico won’t have much
impact on the overall U.S. economy, but they could hurt Mexico, especially
since Mexico has liberalized its financial sector so much that capital tends to
flee the country at the first sign of trouble. For this reason, when the U.S.
Federal Reserve signaled in 2013 that it was going to begin “tapering” its
quantitative easing, the Mexican economy was hit pretty hard.

Ironically, Mexico’s special vulnerability to our erratic
president, and its unhealthy dependence on the U.S. economy are results of the
reforms that the U.S. helped foist upon the country in the 1980s and 90s,
including NAFTA. It’s yet another example of how Washington has created the
problems that drive migration at our southwestern border.

– June 5, 2019 at 06:44AM