‘Poor Mexico, So Far From God, So Close to the United States’

It looks like President Trump can chalk up another win for his unique brand of tariff diplomacy now that Mexico is yielding to America’s demands on improving border security and halting the flow of fentanyl. Mexico’s complaisance appears, for now, to stave off the prospect of a threatened 25 percent tariff on imports from our neighbor to the south. Plus also too, Canada, in a separate deal, will get at least a month of reprieve. Mr. Trump described on his Truth Social network his discussion today with President Claudia Sheinbaum as “a very friendly conversation wherein she agreed to immediately supply 10,000 Mexican Soldiers on the Border separating Mexico and the United States.” The soldados “will be specifically designated to stop the flow of fentanyl, and illegal migrants into our Country,” Mr. Trump added.The cooperation by Mexico’s president is certainly welcome news, and not only because it postpones by at least a month, and perhaps permanently, what could have been a costly trade war. Beyond that, the tentative agreement today underscores the need for Mexico to do a better job both in terms of keeping illegal drugs like fentanyl out of America — and in stanching the flow of migrants across the border.While Ms. Sheinbaum stressed, in her comments following her conversation with Mr. Trump, the importance of “respect” for Mexico’s “sovereignty,” her nation’s seeming inability to handle security along its border casts doubt on what amounts to a defining characteristic of nationhood. A functional state, after all, as Max Weber marked, has a monopoly on the use of force within its borders. That’s not quite the case in cartel-plagued Mexico.So it’s good news that Mexican leaders, who have in the past recoiled from the idea of any Yanqui “boots on the ground” to aid local efforts to defeat drug carters, are increasingly amenable to the idea, as our Benny Avni reported Friday. These efforts could include a beefed-up presence in Mexico by the Drug Enforcement Agency and even the CIA, a former Mexican foreign minister, Jorge Castaneda, told Mr. Avni.Progress in Mexico against the cartels would benefit America, too, especially if it leads to less fentanyl here. That drug kills some 75,000 Americans a year due to overdoses. It’s an astonishing death toll, as historian Victor Davis Hanson explains, exacerbated by what he calls “the deliberate efforts of the cartels to mask fentanyl as less deadly narcotics or camouflage the poison by lacing it into counterfeit prescription drugs.” As for the migration crisis, Mr. Hanson is among those noting how Mexico has an incentive to turn a blind eye to the illegal presence of its citizens in America. “Mexico encourages its expatriate illegal aliens to send back some $63 billion per year in remittances,” Mr. Hanson reports. American taxpayers, in effect, subsidize these payments, Mr. Hanson says, because many migrants here get welfare benefits that “free up the cash to be sent home.”To address this fungibility, Mr. Hanson suggests a 20 percent tax on cash remittances going back to Mexico. That might encourage Ms. Sheinbaum and her regime to hasten their efforts to get control of the border. Ultimately, though, faster economic growth and better domestic security will be the best way to curb migration north. It calls to mind the lament of the 19th century dictator Porfirio Diaz: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” Which brings us back to Mr. Trump, who has been getting grief for using tariffs as a negotiating tool. The success with Mexico could go toward defusing that criticism, especially if similar progress ensues with Canada. At the White House today Mr. Trump allowed as how countries across the globe “are dying to make a deal” with America as he seeks to broadly renegotiate the terms of global trade. And work his way toward the People’s Republic of China.

‘Poor Mexico, So Far From God, So Close to the United States’

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