Trump reveals how he would force Mexico to pay for border wall

[Ad Orientem]

The man is crazier than a bed bug trapped in a jar full of moonshine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

[jafs]

I saw that.

I wonder what possible legal rationale there could be to disallow American citizens from sending their money to their relatives in other countries?

[Ad Orientem]

Day 1: President Trump announces suspension of cash and capital flows into Mexico from the United States.
Day 2: Mexico announces a new treaty of friendship with Russia including the right to build a naval air station at Madero on the Gulf of Mexico.
Day 3: Mexico announces a new treaty of friendship with China including the right to build a naval air station at the southern tip of Baja California on Mexico's Pacific coast.

[MWKXJ]

I'm glad I'm holding several bitcoins as a "remittance-hedge".

Day 1: President Trump announces suspension of cash and capital flows into Mexico from the United States.
Day 2: Mexico announces a new treaty of friendship with Russia including the right to build a naval air station at Madero on the Gulf of Mexico.
Day 3: Mexico announces a new treaty of friendship with China including the right to build a naval air station at the southern tip of Baja California on Mexico's Pacific coast.

Personally, I don't think asking Mexico to discourage its unwanted peasantry from flooding into the United States will create a major global political realignment.  Hell, America has already taken in between 20% and a quarter of Mexico's entire population in the last several decades alone.  If anything, Mexico should be thanking the United States for doling out its citizenship and social benefits on so many of Mexico's untouchable castes.

[Ad Orientem]

Personally, I don't think asking Mexico to discourage its unwanted peasantry from flooding into the United States will create a major global political realignment.  Hell, America has already taken in between 20% and a quarter of Mexico's entire population in the last several decades alone.  If anything, Mexico should be thanking the United States for doling out its citizenship and social benefits on so many of Mexico's untouchable castes.

We are not talking about "asking" Mexico to do anything. We are talking about issuing what is tantamount to an ultimatum backed by the threat of draconian economic sanctions. Any country would consider such a thing to be, if I may borrow a diplomatic phrase, a "hostile act."

[MWKXJ]

We are not talking about "asking" Mexico to do anything. We are talking about issuing what is tantamount to an ultimatum backed by the threat of draconian economic sanctions. Any country would consider such a thing to be, if I may borrow a diplomatic phrase, a "hostile act."

And dumping a quarter of Mexico's unwanted population into the United States isn't hostile?

[Ad Orientem]

We are not talking about "asking" Mexico to do anything. We are talking about issuing what is tantamount to an ultimatum backed by the threat of draconian economic sanctions. Any country would consider such a thing to be, if I may borrow a diplomatic phrase, a "hostile act."

And dumping a quarter of Mexico's unwanted population into the United States isn't hostile?

I prefer to think of it as Karma given the fact the we basically stole about 1/4 of their country.

this is probably playing a bit fast and loose with the complexity's of history, but wasn't the tipping of the scale for parts of Mexico becoming the US, wealthy northern Mexican land owners and ranchers who wanted (and chose) to be on the "join America" side of the dispute?

[MWKXJ]

I prefer to think of it as Karma given the fact the we basically stole about 1/4 of their country.

Most of that 1/4 of Mexico's land was in fact unsettled due to the threat of Indians.  If the United States "stole" anything it was barren land marauded by aboriginal nomads, and certainly not a pre-existing and fully formed democratic republic.  Also, in the case of the Gadsden Purchase and the Mexican Cession, Mexico was in fact compensated.

Personally, while I don't tend to think of it as "karma" that the perpetual-revolutionary state of Mexico has failed to the extent has historically, I do think of it as a warning that Mexico's predominant religion, politics, ethnicity--or a combination thereof--carry with it a germ of ruin which would best be kept out of the United States.

If there really is a "world stage", America has had front-row seats to Mexico's tragicomedy for generations.  America can either learn from the experience, our keep its borders open and become a laughingstock itself.

[Pointedstick]

If the United States "stole" anything it was barren land marauded by aboriginal nomads

That's, uh, one way of putting it.

It's not like people haven't been hurting one another and taking each other's land for millennia, though. There isn't a contemporary country in existence today that didn't take someone else's land and kill a bunch of them at some point in the past. Perhaps the Mexicans should be similarly ashamed of their legacy as the mixed-race descendants of a bunch of murderous Spanish rapists who displaced the natives of that area and took their women.

[MWKXJ]

If the United States "stole" anything it was barren land marauded by aboriginal nomads

That's, uh, one way of putting it.

Not to get sidetracked, but how else should one say it?  If the lands that would constitute the United States were "stolen" from aboriginal nomads, the question becomes "from which tribe?"  If specific tribes are cited as having been stolen from, the questions follow: "since when did nomads own land?,  where are recorded deeds for those properties?, historically, how many other tribes occupied this same land in tandem?, etc."  If its alleged that all tribes were universally stolen from, the questions follow: "does that include the numerous tribes who allied themselves with advancing settlers?, did the nomads even see themselves as a single people?, etc."  If all tribes are alleged to have been stolen from regardless of mutual animosity or extra-ethnic alliances, the questions follow: "under whose law?  did the nomads even practice this law historically?, etc."  If all tribes are alleged to have been stolen from regardless of mutual animosity and extra-ethnic alliances because of God's law, the questions follow: "Did these nomads share a religion holding to this standard?  What of the tradition of war parties and wife-taking?, Scalping?, etc."  If all tribes are alleged to have been stolen from regardless of mutual animosity and extra-ethnic alliances because of Christianity's laws, the question becomes "Does God's Law include the conquest of Canaan? ( Matthew 5:18 )"

There are infinite other branches the dialectic could take, some tending toward amalgamating the disparate nomadic aborigines into a single amorphous blob by which the North American landmass can be assigned past ownership, and other currents which point out the lack of a shared political, ethnic, linguistic unity among the tribes which prevented any collective ownership of the North American landmass.  The point is that the sooner this dialectic take place the less unquestioned platitudes will remain in public discourse, e.g., "We are a nation of immigrants", "Diversity is our strength", "America was stolen from the native American", ad infinitum.

[Pointedstick]

I see where you're going with this, but a lot of your questions are really inapplicable. Of course they didn't have a unified code of laws, property deeds, etc. They were a primitive people compared to European settlers.

Not all of them were nomads, either. Quite a few tribes had permanent settled lands with cities. There's a preserved one in Northern New Mexico, where I live--the Pueblos.


[align=center]

Not nomads[/align]


But even if we're just talking about the nomads, you can't really have a nomadic life in a world where all the land is divided up and and deeded and owned. You keep running into people who say, "well you can't stay here" and eventually you don't have any land where you can be a nomadic tribe and your culture dies.

I'm not saying that this wasn't inevitable, mind you. Certainly the Spanish were every bit as brutal as we were, if not more so in some cases. But let's not hide behind technicalities: our ancestors displaced the inhabitants, destroyed their society, and took the land they were using that they considered to be under the umbrella of "theirs", even if their conception of property was poorly-developed compared to our own. Sure, everyone did that, back in the day. But let's not trivialize it.

[MWKXJ]

I see where you're going with this, but a lot of your questions are really inapplicable. Of course they didn't have a unified code of laws, property deeds, etc. They were a primitive people compared to European settlers.

Not all of them were nomads, either. Quite a few tribes had permanent settled lands with cities. There's a preserved one in Northern New Mexico, where I live--the Pueblos.

[...]

Not nomads

The Taos Pueblo has been continuously occupied since before the arrival of the Conquistadors.  In other words, the Anglos and Spaniards did not thrown them out of their dwellings. I suspect you already know this, but if this people hasn't lost anything, why are they being grouped with peoples who have allegedly lost something?  This seems to be speaking for my argument against lumping all North American aborigines together.

But even if we're just talking about the nomads, you can't really have a nomadic life in a world where all the land is divided up and and deeded and owned. You keep running into people who say, "well you can't stay here" and eventually you don't have any land where you can be a nomadic tribe and your culture dies.

...until the equivalent of the Hunnic Tribes or Mongol Horde makes yet another appearance in history.  Contemporaneous examples might be found in the landless and rootless masses of Mexican peasants currently flooding the United States, or, the dysfunctional and propertyless Near Eastern peoples now swamping the EU.  A strong case could be made that rather than a dying lifestyle, nomadic anarchy is waxing strong as a new normal around the world.  Law, order, and most importantly, the concept of national citizenship, rather than an overpowering idea inevitably and unfairly repressing the world's "noble savages", would instead seem to be a recessive idea, which is, if anything, is once again on the wane.

I'm not saying that this wasn't inevitable, mind you. Certainly the Spanish were every bit as brutal as we were, if not more so in some cases. But let's not hide behind technicalities: our ancestors displaced the inhabitants, destroyed their society, and took the land they were using that they considered to be under the umbrella of "theirs", even if their conception of property was poorly-developed compared to our own.

Displaced, destroyed, and took from which tribe?  As your image of the pueblo testifies, our ancestors did not displace, destroy, and take from every society it came across, and yet regardless, the United States is still eternally tarred with the "national sin" of "stealing from the Indians".  Whether "the Indians" would have even recognized themselves as such is highly debatable as the very lands allotted to North America's aborigines are segregated based on bloodline, e.g., a Choctaw is not a Pima, etc.  The way of life of those pueblo dwellers is currently protected by a blood-relation-based ethnostate ( reservation ) codified by law.  Note that this is far more of a consolation than given to most of today's victims of open borders globalism.  The difference between these peoples seem to be that one is browbeaten by canards that it "deserves diversity good and hard" for past evils, while the other is lionized for being a collective victim, despite the latter never having been a people collectively.

[Ad Orientem]

I'm not sure exactly how, but I have this strange feeling that I have hijacked my own thread. 

[bedraggled]

It's difficult to highjack the "Designated Hitter" thread.

[MachineGhost]

The man is crazier than a bed bug trapped in a jar full of moonshine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

I like his chutzpah.  At least he's actually thinking about doing something about the problem and thinking outside the box.

Western Union already reports all wire transfers above $3K to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, so what's the problem?  Just force money transmitters to prove immigration status and disallow any transfers to Mexico if they're illegals.  The point is to use populism backlash against the transnational elites running Mexico.

[jafs]

There might be some legal justification for disallowing illegal residents to do that, but I'm not sure what it would be.  Generally speaking, the Constitution seems to apply to residents of the USA, whether here legally or not.

But, I can't see any justification for not allowing legal immigrants to do it, and the anti-immigrant stuff often lumps them together.