Politics: Bracing for a Trump Administration
The election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States has major implications for Mexico. The country was a central theme of the Republican campaign, and a good number of the president-elect’s campaign promises are directly related to Mexico.
Some of them, such as repeal of the executive orders signed by President Obama to protect certain categories of undocumented immigrants from possible deportation (DACA and DAPA), most likely will occur on Trump’s first day in office. Those involving mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, building a wall the length of the Mexican border and repeal of Nafta, face legal and political hurdles that could slow and in many cases limit their implementation.
President Enrique Peña Nieto announced last week he has requested a meeting with Donald Trump, preferably during the transition period, though it is not clear to what end. The problem is not a lack of information, as some Mexican officials believe, but of real political incentives.
Moreover, the risks are real, and the Mexican government should think about how it could raise the costs of Washington's adopting measures detrimental to Mexico, so as to change the political equation. Possibilities include strategic reprisals, including targeted responses to punitive measures such as the imposition of a tax on remittance flows to Mexico or trade tariffs, both of which Trump raised in his campaign. Mexico could deploy an aggressive legal strategy in U.S. courts to protect national interests and Mexican immigrants, and appeal the imposition of discriminatory tariffs to the WTO. It can scale back bi-lateral cooperation on strategic issues including Central American immigration to the US and drug trafficking. And it should seek the many potential allies to be found in the global arena.
Of course, all such measures would have significant costs for the country and could prove ineffective in containing hostile measures from a Trump administration. But there is no avoiding the fact that Mexico is going to pay costs in any event. It would be better for Mexican authorities to be thinking about policies to contain such potential Trump initiatives.
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