January 15, 2017
\u2014 A version of this post ran on the AS\/COA site. The views expressed are the author’s own.
From a US presidential candidate\u2019s controversial visit to Mexico City in August 2016 to the Central Bank\u2019s attempts to stop the free fall of the peso, Mexico has been trying to figure out how to prepare itself for a Trump presidency. In fact, it\u2019s been a veritable round of \u201che said\/he said,\u201d as Donald Trump repeatedly insists that Mexico will pay for a border wall and President Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto repeatedly insists that it won\u2019t.
The same thing happened again on Jan. 11, during Mr. Trump\u2019s first \u2013 and possibly his only \u2013 press conference as US president-elect, when he said, \u201cMexico in some form, and there are many different forms, will reimburse us… for the cost of the wall.\u201d
In remarks a few hours later, Mr. Pe\u00f1a Nieto said that Mexico will not do so , nor will it \u201caccept anything that goes against our dignity as a country.\u201d He went on to outline specific areas that he said would be a part of future negotiations with a Trump administration: arms trafficking, immigration, border infrastructure investment, remittances, and trade.
These are the areas covered in Pe\u00f1a Nieto\u2019s speech, as well as the issues underlying each one.
Lax gun-control laws in the US Southwest lead to a relentless flow of illicit weapons into Mexico, fueling the country\u2019s violent drug war. From 2009 to 2014, Mexico traced more than 73,500 illegal firearms \u2013 about 70 percent of those seized \u2013 back to the United States, per a 2016 US Government Accountability Office report. Given Mexico\u2019s more restrictive gun laws , Mexican officials have repeatedly called on Washington to help stop gun trafficking, and the government of former Mexican President Felipe Calder\u00f3n went so far as to place a billboard made of crushed guns near the border proclaiming, \u201cNo more weapons.\u201d
The 2004 expiration of the US assault weapons ban is of particular concern for Mexico; nearly one in five weapons seized at Mexican crime scenes is an assault weapon smuggled from the United States, according to a 2016 letter from US Congressman Eliot L. Engel [D] of New York.
Trump made undocumented immigration and promises of mass deportations a central campaign point. However, Pe\u00f1a Nieto noted that his country faces the burden of being a crossing point for migrants from around the world trying to make it to the United States, citing as an example the presence of some 4,500 Haitian refugees currently in Mexico. Additionally, in the first seven months of 2016 alone, nearly 8,000 Africans and Asians presented themselves to Mexican immigration authorities \u2013 a rate nearly four times the figure for all of 2014.
In recent years, Mexico has also played a direct role , with US backing, to stem the flow of Central Americans fleeing violence in their own countries and heading to the United States. Mexico deported roughly 150,000 migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in 2015, which marks a 44 percent increase over the prior year, according to Pew Research.
Modernizing the US-Mexico border has been a top priority of the bilateral High Level Economic Dialogue. While discussion of a border wall has much to do with security, billions of dollars worth of goods and millions of people cross the US-Mexican border each year, despite often having to suffer through long wait times.
There\u2019s plenty of speculation about how Trump could make good on his promise to make Mexico pay \u2013 or reimburse US taxpayers \u2013 for a wall, one concern being whether he would seize or tax the money Mexican immigrants send home. While there are questions about how this could legally take place, it\u2019s no idle threat given that Mexicans sent $25 billion home in 2015 and that remittances exceed the value of the country\u2019s oil exports. In November, when Trump won the US election, remittance rates to Mexico saw their biggest spike in over a decade, hitting nearly $2.4 billion \u2013 up almost a quarter compared with a year earlier.
Since the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), bilateral US-Mexico trade has more than quintupled. While Trump has threatened to pull the United States out of NAFTA, Mexican officials have said they would be open to modernizing, but not renegotiating, aspects of it. In Wednesday\u2019s speech, Pe\u00f1a Nieto not only called for securing investment and trade with Canada and the United States, but also alluded to Trump\u2019s Twitter threats of automakers with US investments, saying , \u201cWe reject any intent to influence investment decisions through fear or threats.\u201d
The president also suggested that Mexico, which sends roughly 80 percent of its exports to the United States, would look to deepen trade relations with other countries, including Latin American economies such as Argentina and Brazil, by forging ties with Asia via the G20 and the Pacific Alliance, and by prioritizing a trade deal with the European Union.
Carin Zissis is editor-in-chief of AS\/COA Online, the website of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas.<\/p>\n

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