The South American invasion of the USA is called off.

Posted by Pointman on April 6, 2018 · 15 Comments 

You may have heard of a march of 1500 people, mainly Honduran, making their way northward through Mexico with the intention of forcing an entrance into America illegally. It’s essentially a political move to force the issue of giving migrants the freedom to just waltz into the country, or at least that’s the hope of the various shadowy NGOs who’ve actually organised it. Since DACA failed, this is the next strategy to achieve the same objective.

By some accounts, this northward movement of people from central America happens every year though not organised into such a large “caravan”, nor so well publicised in advance by the liberal media friends of its organisers. Apparently, the latter were sending out appeals to borrow some children to improve the visuals of what was predominantly an all male march. You know, just setting the media scene in advance – heartless American border guards confronting pitiful refugee families with young children and refusing them entry.

Given the publicity and the help the shadowy organisers were giving the caravan, the hope was they could do a rerun of the 2016 invasion of Europe. As it made its way northwards, it would be joined by thousands and thousands more people until the numbers had swelled so much, they simply couldn’t be refused entry. The pressure would be on Trump to fling open his borders or look like a heartless bastard.

Either way, Trump would be placed in a lose-lose situation; let them in and look weak for having gone back on all his campaign promises, or look like an unfeeling brute as the no doubt carefully engineered violence broke out between the migrants and the border patrol.

Presented with essentially the same problem of mass migration, the weak European leadership just crumbled straight away; letting in millions of illiterate Muslim men of no use to a 21st century society and probably only of marginal use if this were the 14th. They had absolutely no intention of integrating into anything except the welfare support systems and to this day, less than 100 of the 1.5 million Germany let in have a full-time job. Why should they? They’re being handed free money.

They also brought with them murderous terrorist attacks and a rape culture which flourishes in the no-go zones they promptly established in every major city. I forgot, those zones don’t exist, officially anyway. Two years down the line, London, Rome and Berlin now look like Mogadishu with murder, rape and crime rates across all categories climbing totally out of control. Sweden is no more. When you import the third world en masse, you get the third world with all its attendant problems.

Trump, in the innovative problem solving fashion I’ve come to really enjoy, deftly moved the pressure off himself and squarely onto other people, but he’s also taken advantage of the opportunities it presented to advance other quite distinct political agendas. His moves in such situations are in retrospect always simple, after you get over the initial surprise, but the real intent of them is in the ramifications of what it’s saying.

He told Honduras that if that caravan wasn’t disbanded, he’d cut every cent of foreign aid it received from him. Honduras, being in all but name a failed state run by gangsters, promptly started pulling on the reins of the horses pulling the caravan, because nobody wants to lose a free income stream. There won’t be any more caravans originating from there.

He told Mexico that unless they addressed the problem, there wouldn’t be any renegotiation of NAFTA, he’d simply withdraw from it unilaterally. Again, that’s a deadly money threat and to understand why, a little thumbnail sketch of Mexico’s current economic situation is required.

It’s biggest export, or its biggest legal one, is oil. It currently exports about $7bn a year but with the shale revolution over the border and consequently America having become a net exporter of oil, that income stream has weakened in parallel with the price of oil. If OPEC couldn’t hold it together, Mexico certainly can’t when demand from their once biggest market is in decline.

Its biggest export is narcotics, which is currently running at an estimated $35bn and again their biggest customer is guess who. When Trump took over, all the laissez-faire guidelines of the Obama years about how both law enforcement and the judiciary should take a softly-softly approach to narcotics were thrown out. Law enforcement has been let off the leash and both dealers and smugglers are now feeling the heat big time.

Consequently, that income source, coming mainly from bribery to let drugs pass through Mexico unhindered, is slowing too. Not only because of the American crack down on the whole trade, but also the prospect of the wall being built, which will complicate things even further. Trump is determined to roll back the opioid crisis and on his track record of doing what he says, nobody is taking bets against him.

All that’s left is the legitimate trade with America of cheap goods, of questionable indirect origin, which courtesy of NAFTA enter America freely and without tariffs. This flow of goods northwards, and therefore money southwards, looks to be a solitary constant for the future, but is really only viable under NAFTA free trade rules, which Trump is re-negotiating. Nobody south of Tijuana seriously expects the good old days of fat profits to survive that negotiation with Trump.

Profit margins will be brutalised, but at least they’ll still exist. If he unilaterally withdraws from NAFTA, they won’t, and every man and his dawg from Missoura knows Trump wants nothing more than to get America the hell out of that trade agreement. A caravan of aggressive migrants from South America trying to invade America forcefully is all the excuse he needs.

Some motions were made by Mexico, but it’s called doing the noddies. You’ve asked somebody if they’re going to do something to which they assent by vigorously nodding their head, but you can plainly see that apart from perhaps a nominal gesture to accommodate your request, they’re not going to do anything at all. In some countries, certainly the Latin ones of the West, it’s seen as a polite way of saying no without offending.

Trump being Trump, and recognising he was being treated to the noddies by los Mexicanos, simply mobilised the National Guard and some other military bits to make a statement at the southern border. Suddenly the caravan, rather than being chipped away at listlessly by the Mexicans, was disbanded. When you’ve got somebody by the bollocks who still thinks they can half-cooperate, you just squeeze that little bit harder.

The caravan is by current accounts no more, but it was not only solved, but put to full political use by Trump. What was supposed to be a cunning plan has degenerated into a shambles, because el Presidente Trumpo booted the arse that was unthinkingly being presented to him by the genius planners of what’s become a social media left. No lessons about him have been learnt in the last year.

He used the proffered crisis creatively. If there ever was any doubt, he’s now seen as the one tough guy to protect America from external threats of whatever sort. A recalcitrant GOP faction in congress are going to find it increasingly difficult to explain to their voters why they oppose the wall, when if there was a credible border there in the first place, such a stunt would never have occurred.

The big message though, is that there weren’t any Obama era red lines being drawn that everyone knew could safely be ignored and crossed with impunity. There weren’t diplomats from a largely despised State Department scurrying around behind the scenes to solve the problem. There was just Trump and with a handful of tweets on social media, foreigners frantically made with the feet to make the problem go away. He crushed them in public and in front of his estimated 70m of followers.

In public.

That was the extra-large takeaway from the whole exercise and his true intent in the way he solved it.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Mexico, Politics, Trump