National Review Online
Saturday, June 01, 2019
President Trump believes, not without good reason, that
the Mexican government is not doing its utmost to stop the illegal flow of
Central Americans crossing the U.S. border. And so he has responded with . . .
a $17 billion–a–year–and–rising sales tax on Americans.
The president loves tariffs. He believes that they are an
effective means of protecting American firms from unfair overseas competition
and a good negotiating tool as he works to reform trade agreements that he
believes are disadvantageous to Americans. But the question of who ends up
actually paying any given tax is complicated. The price of those tariffs, and
the retaliatory tariffs they have provoked, is very high for American
companies: For example, the tariffs Beijing imposed in response to Trump’s have
cost American farmers an enormous part of their export market (half of exported
U.S. soybeans used to go to China; the tariffs have been a gift to Brazilian
producers), but the U.S. tariffs themselves are an enormous problem, too. Many
American manufacturers import raw materials and components from abroad, and
complex products such as automobiles and electronics may cross the border
several times in the course of production.
A 5 percent tariff on Mexican goods would notionally
amount to about $17 billion on U.S. imports from Mexico, touching everything
from industrial components to fruit and crude oil. In reality, it is difficult
to say how much money would be raised, because buyers respond to tariffs in
unpredictable ways. In any case, many of those costs will be borne by American
consumers and — this cannot be emphasized enough — American businesses that rely in some part on
imported inputs. More important, it would cause uncertainty around a North
American supply chain that has evolved organically over many years as the
result of enormous investment by American companies and their business
partners.
President Trump envisions a tariff that will potentially
ratchet up to 25 percent.
The president here is unnecessarily complicating his own
life. He has just overseen the successful renegotiation of NAFTA, which will be
reconstituted as the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). But that agreement
has not yet been ratified — not by the United States, and not by Mexico.
Imposing punitive tariffs over a policy dispute unrelated to trade five minutes
after negotiating a new trade pact makes the Trump administration — and the United
States — look like an unreliable negotiating partner. Mexico is not wrong to
resent it, and even Trump allies such as Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) are
against him on this.
Also, it’s a good rule of thumb to fight one trade war at
a time. If the administration, correctly, wants to focus on China’s malign
trade practices — and not just during the current dispute but over the long
term — it needs good trading relationships with its allies, especially here in
North America.
Illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America is a
significant problem, and President Trump did well to put it at the center of
his agenda. Many of the policies he has proposed — walls, increased
enforcement, changes in asylum policy — are worthwhile and would likely prove
effective if implemented. But Congress isn’t interested in passing them, which
has left the president to grasp for unilateral ways to solve the border crisis.
Some of these are politically unsustainable or of dubious legality, e.g. the
zero-tolerance policy and the unilateral spending under the emergency
declaration.
Mexico has played ball with Trump on immigration policy
more than anyone would have expected at the outset of his presidency, but there
are limits to the Mexican government’s effectiveness and its willingness to
subordinate its interests to ours. Ideally, we’d get Mexico to sign a “safe
third country” agreement. That would allow us to exclude asylum-seekers who
transit through Mexico on the basis that they should be applying in Mexico
instead. Of course, Mexico has no incentive to make it possible for
asylum-seekers to stay there instead of enabling them to quickly move on to the
United States.
If Trump’s tariff threat gets Mexico to sign such an
agreement, we will be the first to congratulate him on his successful
brinkmanship. But it is more likely that Mexico will make some assurances that
will be enough to get Trump to relent, while not changing anything fundamental
on immigration.
The worst-case scenario is getting no action from Mexico
whatsoever and the imposition of spiraling, disruptive tariffs, whose costs
will in fact fall, to a great extent, on Americans.
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