The News
US President-elect Donald Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum offered seemingly contradictory accounts of their telephone conversation on the subject of migration.
“She has agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” Trump claimed in a post online after the talks, prompting Sheinbaum to write: ”We reiterate that Mexico’s position is not to close borders but to build bridges between governments and between peoples.″
The conversation came after Trump’s pledges to ramp up tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China earlier this week, a move Sheinbaum warned could destroy 400,000 US jobs.
SIGNALS
Trump’s tariff threats could be a negotiating ploy over immigration
Trump’s tariff threats could be more of a negotiating tactic than an actual intended policy, one analyst told Reuters, geared “to achieve goals largely unrelated to trade.” During Trump’s first term, tariff warnings ultimately resulted in Mexico giving into his flagship “remain in Mexico” immigration policy, which forced migrants to stay in the country while their applications were being processed in the US, CNN wrote. Pushing for more aggressive trade policies now will also help Trump build leverage heading into 2026 when the US-Mexico-Canada free trade deal he created in 2018 is up for renegotiations, the outlet noted.
Tariff warnings are a blast from the past
Trump’s threatened 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports bring back “bitter memories” of a trade war during his previous presidency, The Guardian wrote. The impacts back then were “barely noticeable” in the overall economy, wrote The Associated Press, but the scale of tariffs is expected to be much larger this time. Trump’s tariff threats have already prompted Canada’s prime minister to call an emergency domestic meeting, while the European Central Bank’s chief urged the continent’s leaders to buy more US products in a bid to placate the incoming president.