During the election campaign, Donald Trump told his supporters repeatedly that he would build a wall on the southern U.S. border and that Mexico would pay for it, now it’s being reported that the incoming Administration will ask Congress to pay for the wall:
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has signaled to congressional Republican leaders that his preference is to fund the border wall through the appropriations process as soon as April, according to House Republican officials.
The move would break a key campaign promise when Trump repeatedly said he would force Mexico to pay for the construction of the wall along the border, though in October, Trump suggested for the first time that Mexico would reimburse the US for the cost of the wall.
Trump defended that proposal Friday morning in a tweet, saying the move to use congressional appropriations was because of speed.
“The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!” Trump tweeted Friday.
New York Rep. Chris Collins said Friday that American taxpayers would front the cost for the wall but that he was confident Trump could negotiate getting the money back from Mexico.
“When you understand that Mexico’s economy is dependent upon US consumers, Donald Trump has all the cards he needs to play,” Collins, congressional liaison for the Trump transition team, told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on “New Day.” “On the trade negotiation side, I don’t think it’s that difficult for Donald Trump to convince Mexico that it’s in their best interest to reimburse us for building the wall.”
The Trump team argues it will have the authority through a Bush-era 2006 law to build the wall, lawmakers say, but it lacks the money to do so. Transition officials have told House GOP leaders in private meetings they’d like to pay for the wall in the funding bill, a senior House GOP source said.
“It was not done in the Obama administration, so by funding the authorization that’s already happened a decade ago, we could start the process of meeting Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to secure the border,” Indiana Republican Rep. Luke Messer said on Thursday.
Messer admitted it’s “big dollars, but it’s a question of priorities.” He pointed to a border security bill that Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul proposed last year that cost roughly $10 billion.
“Democrats may well find themselves in the position to shut down all of government to stop the buildout of a wall, or of a barrier, or of a fence,” Messer said.
Mexican leaders have repeatedly said they will not pay for the wall.The Associated Press and Politico first reported elements of the talks earlier Thursday.
If Mexico refuses to pay for the wall, the GOP could add billions of dollars into the spending bill that needs to pass by April 28 to keep the government open. But doing so would force a showdown with Senate Democrats and potentially threaten a government shutdown.
No decisions have been made, GOP sources said.
The news hardly comes as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, of course. Virtually from the moment that Trump first announced this plan, repeated statements from officials in the Mexican government have indicated that it would be their position that Mexico would never pay for the wall. As Trump’s critics pointed out repeatedly during the campaign, it was unlikely that Mexico would ever change its position on this issue and that Trump’s repeated statements to the contrary were little more than another example of the bluster and boasting that personified his campaign for the Presidency from the beginning. In that sense, the news that the incoming Administration now plans to ask Congress to allocate money for the construction of this so-called wall would seem to be yet another example of a Trump campaign promise that is likely to fall far short of reality once he actually gets into office. The Trump transition team, of course, isn’t admitting this, and continues to insist that it would seek reimbursement for the cost of the wall from Mexico. Collecting on that debt, however, is likely to prove impossible:
{T}he proposals Trump has outlined to coerce Mexico into paying for the wall involve controversial measures that would still likely fail to cover the wall’s full cost.
According to Trump’s website, those steps could include: remittance seizure, potential tariffs and foreign aids cuts, increasing fees on temporary visas issued to Mexican CEOs and diplomats, increasing fees on border crossing cards, increasing fees on NAFTA worker visas; and increasing fees at ports of entry to the US from Mexico.
A major challenge for judging Trump’s proposal is that most of those steps amount to a drop in the bucket — less than $1 billion — compared to the proposed cost of the wall. And the one step that could provide the required amount of money — remittance seizure — would face major legal obstacles, in addition to the likelihood of severe domestic and international backlash.
Total US foreign aid to Mexico is less than $200 million a year ($186,000,000 in the 2014 fiscal year), so redirecting all of that money to a border wall would only put a mild dent in the $8 billion bill. And it’s difficult to know the amount of revenue generated from a tariff on Mexican exports — or to account for potential losses from a retaliatory tariff — without the specifics of the tax.
Moving next to fee increases, Trump says on his website that “even a small increase in visa fees would pay for the wall. This includes fees on border crossing cards, of which more than 1 million are issued a year.” But the fees for visas and border crossing cards range from around $150 to $200 each, according to State Department data. Accounting for all the fees on over a million border crossing cards and visas in a year year — and even accounting for a twofold increase in those fees — that would still only generate about half a billion dollars, well short of an $8 billion price tag.
The biggest potential source of money for the wall would come from remittance seizure: remittance payments are money that immigrants, legal and illegal, earn in their country of residence and send back to their families in their native country.
According to the bank of Mexico, Mexico received $24.8 billion in remittance payments in 2015. A Fox News Latino report calculated that 97% of remittance payments received by Mexico in the first three months of 2015 came from the US, and the Pew Research Center similarly reported that “nearly all” of Mexico’s remittance payment revenue comes from the U.S.” Seizing all of that money would probably be more than enough to pay for the border wall.
The problem with relying on remittances, of course, is that this money is the personal property of the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who are sending money back to friends and/or family members, not the property of the Mexican government. Any effort on Trump’s part to use these reimbursements to cover the alleged cost of a border wall, then, would likely result in a myriad of lawsuits that the Federal Government would in all likelihood lose. Therefore, unless the Mexican government somehow magically decides to the change its mind and pay for the wall, the entire structure, most of which is already pointless given the fact that we have a border fence in place that has proven quite effective in preventing border crossings in particular areas, would end up being paid for by the American taxpayer. Trump and his people are likely smart enough to realize this, but hope that they’ll be able to deceive the public long enough that nobody will notice. Given how the election turned out, they could be right.
