Fox News’ Carlson on Tariffs: U.S. Must Strike Back Against ‘Hostile Foreign Power’ Mexico over Illegal Immigration
1:39
Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson argued for President Donald Trump’s threat of imposing a 5% tariff on Mexico over its government’s unwillingness to help stem the flow of illegal immigration into the United States.
Carlson called Mexico a “hostile foreign power,” and likened that flow of immigration to an attack. He acknowledged the tariff could have an economic impact on the United States but insisted it was still a proper response.
“Not every government policy is a pure economic calculation,” Carlson said. “When the United States is attacked by a hostile foreign power, it must strike back. And make no mistake, Mexico is a hostile foreign power. For decades, Mexico has sent its poor north to our country. This has allowed that country’s criminal oligarchy to maintain power and get even richer but at great expense to us.”
“The flood of illegal workers into the United States has damaged our communities, ruined our schools, burdened our health care system and fractured our national unity,” he continued. “It has suppressed wages for our most vulnerable. It has been a slow-motion attack on this country, and its effects have been devastating. There’s not a lot of real debate about that. The numbers are clear. Honest people admit it. But our leaders are not honest. In the hours after the president’s announcement, they instinctively sided with Mexico.”
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1:39
Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson argued for President Donald Trump’s threat of imposing a 5% tariff on Mexico over its government’s unwillingness to help stem the flow of illegal immigration into the United States.
Carlson called Mexico a “hostile foreign power,” and likened that flow of immigration to an attack. He acknowledged the tariff could have an economic impact on the United States but insisted it was still a proper response.
“Not every government policy is a pure economic calculation,” Carlson said. “When the United States is attacked by a hostile foreign power, it must strike back. And make no mistake, Mexico is a hostile foreign power. For decades, Mexico has sent its poor north to our country. This has allowed that country’s criminal oligarchy to maintain power and get even richer but at great expense to us.”
“The flood of illegal workers into the United States has damaged our communities, ruined our schools, burdened our health care system and fractured our national unity,” he continued. “It has suppressed wages for our most vulnerable. It has been a slow-motion attack on this country, and its effects have been devastating. There’s not a lot of real debate about that. The numbers are clear. Honest people admit it. But our leaders are not honest. In the hours after the president’s announcement, they instinctively sided with Mexico.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
Trump’s Mexican tariff threat hits global markets
Global financial markets have been delivered a shock with the announcement by US President Trump that he will impose a 5 percent tariff on all Mexican goods from June 10, rising to 25 percent by October, in support of his demand that its government take action to halt the flow of refugees into the US.
Equity markets around the world finished a negative month on Friday as shares were sold and yields on government bonds fell in a rush to safety on the back of the announcement.
The markets have been roiled by the fact that Trump—in addition to his economic war against China, the threat of auto tariffs on Europe and Japan, as well as the blacklisting of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, and the threat to cut off Britain from intelligence sharing if it uses Huawei gear in its telecom networks—has added another dimension to trade and financial instability.
That is, in pursuit of his political agenda, amid the deepening factional conflict within the US ruling class, Trump is prepared to resort to the unprecedented use of economic measures, with far-reaching international ramifications.
The immediate impetus for the tariff move was the renewed calls for Trump’s impeachment following the surprise remarks on Wednesday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in which he contradicted White House claims that his report into supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election had exonerated Trump of criminal violations.
Trump responded late Thursday with the Mexican tariff announcement, seeking to mobilise his right-wing and nationalist supporters by intensifying his war on immigrants and refugees in the name of “border control” and “national security.” The tariff move is being invoked under the International Emergency Economic Act which allows the president to bypass Congress in carrying out a wide range of economic measures.
US markets closed lower on Friday because of concerns over the impact of the tariffs measures themselves and the broader issues flowing from the mixing of trade and immigration. Jay Timmons, the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, said the Trump move had created a “Molotov cocktail of policy.”
The proposed tariffs would have “devastating consequences on manufacturers in America and on American consumers.”
“We have taken our concerns to the highest levels of the administration and strongly urge them to consider carefully the impact of this action on working families across this country,” he said.
David Schwietert, interim president of the Auto Alliance, which represents US and foreign car manufactures in Washington, warned that any barrier to the flow of commerce across the US-Mexico border would have a “cascading effect” harming consumers and threatening jobs and investment.
On the back of the tariff threat US market indexes lost more than 1 percent on Friday. The Dow fell by 355 points, or 1.4 percent, ending its sixth consecutive week of losses, the longest losing streak since 2011. The S&P 500 fell 1.3 percent while the Nasdaq dropped by 1.5 percent.
The tariff move led to divisions within the administration with Wall Street Journal reporting the US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer was “not happy” because it would jeopardise passage of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) through Congress.
After the report, the trade representative’s office was forced to issue a statement saying Lighthizer supported what the president was doing. It is doubtful, however, if Lighthizer even knew about it until the last minute. Democratic congressman Earl Blumenauer said he had spoken with him about the USMCA on Thursday afternoon but there was no mention of the tariffs.
There are divisions within the Republican Party over the move. Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade, said it was a misuse of “presidential authority and congressional intent.”
Senator Lindsey Graham came out in support, tweeting: “I support President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Mexico until they up their game to help us with our border disaster.”
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro sought to calm the markets, telling the business channel CNBC that investors should look at the situation calmly and that “this is actually a brilliant move by the president to get Mexico’s attention.”
There was a shocked international response from financial analysts and commentators.
Ulrich Leuchtmann, an analyst at Germany’s Commerzbank, told the Financial Times: “Sometimes you have to reconsider everything you ever considered a certainty. Today is such an occasion.”
Krishna Guha, the vice chairman of the investment banking firm Evercore ISI pointed to the long-term implications of Trump’s move in his comments to the newspaper.
“It suggests that Trump trade policy might well mean a permanent state of endemic uncertainty and instability in the global trading system not simply a hard-headed sequential re-set of prior arrangements that started with Mexico and proceeds via China to Europe and Japan,” he said.
The wider implications of the latest Trump moves, in which the US has shown that it is prepared to use economic leverage and power to advance its interests well beyond trade, were pointed to by Martin Moeller in remarks to the Wall Street Journal. The next target could be NATO members that are not lifting military spending in line with US demands.
“If NATO member isn’t complying tariffs could also be used as a weapon against such a country to force whatever political issue they have,” he said.
Such comments point to the fact that the Trump trade and economic agenda does not operate with the framework of the post-war system—set up and sustained over decades by the US—but aims to completely overturn it.
This involves a process in which all arms of the American state are now being “weaponised”—from the detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Canada on the initiative of the Justice Department, the use of “national security” powers to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium and possibly autos, to the Commerce Department blacklisting of Huawei and other Chinese firms.
Recalling nothing so much as the economic and political turbulence of the 1930s, there is an objective logic to this process, now accelerated by Trump’s latest move. It points to the mounting danger of war as the US strives to maintain its position of global dominance by all means necessary.
"Fox’s Tucker Carlson noted Thursday that Obrador has previously proposed ranting AMNESTY TO MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS. “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class,” Carlson added."
MEXICO’S INVASION, OCCUPATION and LOOTING OF AMERICA by INVITATION OF THE GLOBALIST LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY for WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
"Fox’s Tucker Carlson noted Thursday that Obrador has previously proposed ranting AMNESTY TO MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS. “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class,” Carlson added."
"The man likely to be the next president of Mexico just called for mass migration to the US" RICK MORAN
“And soon, very soon — after the
victory of our movement — we will
defend all the migrants in the American
continent and all the migrants in the
world,” Obrador said, adding that
immigrants “must leave their towns
and find a life in the United States.”
RICK MORAN
Mexico’s President to Donald Trump: America Is for Migrants
7:04
Poor people have a right to migrate to the United States, and migrants should not be stopped by force, according to a letter from Mexico’s president to U.S. President Donald Trump.
President López Obrador’s May 30 letter, provided by the Wall Street Journal, claimed a migrant’s “right for justice,” saying:
President Trump. Social problems are not resolved by taxes or coercive measures. How do you transform the country of fraternity for the world’s migrants into a ghetto, a closed space, where migrants are stigmatized, mistreated, persecuted, expelled and the right for justice is canceled to those who tirelessly seek to live free of misery?
The letter also suggested that poor Mexicans have a right to migrate into the United States: “It is worth remembering that, within a short period of time, Mexicans will not need to migrate into the United States and that migration will become optional, not compulsory.”
Obrador’s letter did not formally reject or accept Trump’s demand that Mexico block the huge Central American migration into the United States, nor did it directly denounce Trump’s threat to impose rising tariffs on Mexico.
Instead, it repeatedly claimed poor people have a right to move into the United States.
In one section, the letter appropriates the Statue of Liberty as a supposed symbol of legal migration, saying “The Statue of Liberty is not an empty symbol.”
In reality, the statue was built to show other nations how America’s Constitution and culture help create a thriving democracy. Since then, many progressives have tried to argue the status is a symbolic invitation to migrants.
Since 1965, when the nation’s immigration laws were loosened, the U.S. population of Mexican-ancestry citizens and illegal immigrants has exploded to 30 million. That huge population delivers about $30 billion in remittances to Mexico each year.
Obrador also suggested that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt endorsed easy migration:
President Roosevelt was a titan of liberties. He proclaimed the four fundamental rights of humankind before anyone else: the right to freedom of speech, the right to freedom of religion, the right to live free from fear, and the right to live free from misery.
Additionally, Obrador argued that “universal justice” will triumph over national borders, saying:
With all due respect, even though you have the right to express it, the slogan “America First” is a fallacy because until the end of time, even over national borders, universal justice and fraternity will prevail.…Nothing by force, everything by reason and Law!
In the United States, many establishment figures also assert that Americans’ homeland is a nation of and for immigrants, not a homeland for 280 million America-born citizens and their children. In 2018, former GOP Gov. Nikki Haley told an Indian audience, “The one thing about America and what I have always loved is America is a country of immigrants. It’s the fabric of America to have multiple cultures. Multiple populations. Multiple heritages that do come into America that make it what it is.”
The second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Dick Durbin declared in February 2018 that “rejecting the notion that we are a nation of immigrants [is] to deny our birthright as a nation … to really defy who we are, what we are and what we will be.” Also, he declared, “We have a diverse nation, and that is our strength as far as I’m concerned.”
Progressives also insist that Americans must not favor their people, children, ideas, and traditions. In November 2014, for example, former President Barack Obama told cheering supporters:
Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently. And that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration. If you look at the history of immigration in this country, each successive wave, there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks’ — even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.
In contrast, Trump has repeatedly argued that America is for Americans. In his May 30 letter announcing the new tariff threat, he said:
As everyone knows, the United States of America has been invaded by hundreds of thousands of people coming through Mexico and entering our country illegally. This sustained influx of illegal aliens has profound consequences on every aspect of our national life—overwhelming our schools, overcrowding our hospitals, draining our welfare system, and causing untold amounts of crime. Gang members, smugglers, human traffickers, and illegal drugs and narcotics of all kinds are pouring across the Southern Border and directly into our communities. Thousands of innocent lives are taken every year as a result of this lawless chaos. It must end NOW!…The current state of affairs is profoundly unfair to the American taxpayer, who bears the extraordinary financial cost imposed by large-scale illegal migration. Even worse is the terrible and preventable loss of human life. Some of the most deadly and vicious gangs on the planet operate just across our border and terrorize innocent communities.…For years, Mexico has not treated us fairly—but we are now asserting our rights as a sovereign Nation.…The United States is a great country that can no longer be exploited due to its foolish and irresponsible immigration laws. For the sake of our people, and for the sake of our future, these horrendous laws must be changed now.…As President of the United States, my highest duty is the defense of the country and its citizens. A nation without borders is not a nation at all. I will not stand by and allow our sovereignty to be eroded, our laws to be trampled, or our borders to be disrespected anymore.
Immigration Numbers
Each year, approximately four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including about one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply stimulates economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of deflating wages by flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The economic policy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy furthermore moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
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