Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
On November 25, president-elect Donald Trump pledged to impose a 25 percent tariff on all goods from Mexico and Canada until these countries “solve” undocumented migration and illicit fentanyl trafficking into the United States. Trump also announced plans for an additional 10 percent tariff on goods from China.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded that tariffs would lead to inflation and job loss, not to solutions. She also implied that Mexico would impose retaliatory tariffs. Trump and Sheinbaum later reported having a productive phone call, though each described the conversation differently: Trump claimed Sheinbaum had agreed to stop migration to the U.S. border, while Sheinbaum clarified that this had not been her message.
Below, we take a look at the implications of Trump’s tariff threats for migration, the synthetic drug overdose crisis, and U.S.-Mexico relations.
Mexico is already carrying out its most aggressive crackdown ever on migrants and asylum seekers and has been doing so since the second half of 2023.
During the first Trump administration (2017-2021), Mexican authorities reported blocking or encountering migrants an average of 10,531 times per month. During the Biden administration’s first 28 months, when it kept in place the Trump-era “Title 42” pandemic expulsions policy, Mexico’s count of blocked or encountered migrants tripled to 33,128 per month, increasing along with overall migration.
During the last seven months of 2023, Mexico’s number nearly tripled again, to 85,305 migrant encounters per month, without any public threats from the Biden administration. In October of that year, Mexico all but stopped issuing short-term Humanitarian Visitor Cards to migrants transiting its territory.
Despite those measures, migration through Mexico persisted through 2023: December was a record-breaking month for migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border. That month, the Biden administration shut down some official border crossings, claiming that personnel manning those ports of entry were needed elsewhere to process arriving asylum seekers. This dealt Mexico an economic blow while Biden administration cabinet members privately implored the Mexican government to crack down harder.
Mexico’s 2024 crackdown has been its most intense ever. Since January, Mexico has averaged 115,636 blocked or encountered migrants per month—11 times the monthly average during Trump’s first administration. For the first time ever, Mexico’s number has equaled or even exceeded Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) and Border Patrol’s count of migrants encountered at the border. Mexico cracked down so swiftly that Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions plummeted 50 percent in a single month, from December 2023 to January 2024: the sharpest month-to-month drop of the 21st century so far. This happened without a mention of tariffs or other punishments.
Mexico’s increased migrant blockages and encounters did not come with increases in detention or deportation. In what gets referred to as a “merry-go-round” or “chutes and ladders” strategy, Mexican authorities have instead rounded up several thousand people per month and bused them elsewhere, usually dropping them in cities in the country’s far south.
Mexico’s crackdown has stranded tens of thousands of people in the country, delaying or denying protection to many seeking safety in the United States and forcing many to live in squalid encampments in Mexico City and in cities elsewhere in southern Mexico. Those prevented from moving through Mexico have opted to wait, often for many months, for appointments at U.S. ports of entry using the CBP One smartphone app. The Trump administration is very likely to end the CBP One option.
Mexico’s crackdown has reduced migration in the short term, but it is not a long-term strategy. The reasons people are fleeing remain in place, the U.S. immigration and asylum systems remain broken and backlogged, and a smuggling industry enabled by official corruption continues to thrive and find ways around “get-tough” strategies. Crackdowns don’t “solve” migration challenges with deeper causes: they only delay them.
In his threat to impose tariffs, Trump intoned that “Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem.” From this view, it’s basically a matter of political will, and if Mexicans lack enough will to get the job done, the looming threat of U.S. tariffs will focus their attention. Whether or not Trump actually believes that Mexico can easily solve drug trafficking, by placing the onus on the Mexican government, he continues in a long U.S. political tradition of blaming foreigners–and especially Latin Americans–for U.S. drug problems. At the same time, Trump implicitly absolves himself from any responsibility for the U.S. overdose problem, because it’s all the fault of Mexico (and, in Trump’s view, Canada) for supplying the illicit drugs.
It’s important to recognize that after increasing for years, drug overdose deaths in the United States are finally going down. During Trump’s first term, overdose deaths caused by synthetic opioids such as fentanyl quadrupled. So if the welcome, but incipient, decline in overdose deaths continues–something we should all hope will be the case–we should expect that Trump will point to his tariff threats to take credit, no matter the reality. It seems clear that Trump’s tariff threat is about setting himself up to take credit for good outcomes, and to deny responsibility and blame others if things don’t work out.
The reality is that neither the threat of tariffs nor their actual implementation would do anything to affect the fundamentals of drug prohibition that drive illicit drug trafficking. The enforcement actions that make the headlines–arrests, seizures, shoot-outs–provide a sensation of government determination and impact on supply. But that’s always been a mirage, played up by drug enforcement agencies to bolster their own reputations and budgets. Product losses and organizational disruptions caused by enforcement operations are built into the business model of drug traffickers; they just make more drugs, and new leaders step up (often with enormous bloodshed) when previous leaders are removed, either by rivals or by the government.
If down the road Trump brags about increased arrests and drug seizures as the outcome of his tariff threats, there’s no reason to believe that such indicators have any bearing on the actual flow of drugs. First, according to CBP, more than 90% of U.S. seizures of fentanyl at the ports of entry, involve U.S. citizens. Second, we don’t really know how much supply is arriving, precisely because traffickers use methods and modes to conceal their product and ensure its delivery. Fentanyl is so potent and compact, the quantity needed to supply the entire U.S. market is fairly minimal. So the drug war theater of arrests and interdiction doesn’t mean traffickers aren’t supplying the market.
Given the huge profits to be made under conditions of prohibition and the fact that Mexico is at the doorstep of the world’s wealthiest country and most lucrative market for illegal drugs, the drugs will flow, and the power to shape the market will be almost entirely in the hands of outlaws, not the government. Prohibition also incentivizes traffickers to favor drugs that are cheap to produce and easy to smuggle, which is why traffickers transitioned from a plant-based drug like heroin to a highly potent, very compact synthetic opioid like fentanyl.
If Trump really wants to shake up a failed status quo and find real solutions to illicit drug trafficking and the overdose crisis, he should point to the real problem: our catastrophic commitment to drug prohibition itself.
Trump announced he would “charge Mexico and Canada” the 25% tariff – but that’s not how tariffs work. Foreign governments do not pay tariffs to the United States. Rather, tariffs are import taxes. Hence, U.S.-imposed tariffs increase how much U.S. importers, and ultimately U.S. consumers, pay for imported goods. In this case, the tariffs would apply simultaneously to goods from the United States’ three largest trading partners, meaning the domestic impacts could be dramatic. Retaliatory tariffs could add to the level of economic disruption.
On the Mexican side of the border, the proposed tariffs would represent a significant blow to industries that entail the exportation of goods to the U.S., impacting an economy that relies heavily on U.S.-bound exports and increasing the risk of unemployment and other negative economic outcomes. This panorama could increase the likelihood that workers and families in Mexico would seek to migrate to the United States as a means of survival.
Even if the tariffs are never imposed, however, and merely serve as a threat to obtain promises from Mexican authorities of yet more (or continued) migration crackdowns or drug interdiction, this approach will only replicate ineffective, tried-and-failed strategies in the U.S.-Mexico relationship. Attempting to block migration through crackdowns pushes migrants to take riskier routes to avoid detection, fueling human smuggling by criminal organizations and exposing migrants to extortion and violence. Militarized drug control actions in Mexico over the past few decades have been far from effective as a strategy against the illicit drug trade or violence in general, and have resulted in serious human rights violations.
Repeating these same, counterproductive patterns will leave little room for actually improving bilateral engagement to address heightened migration, problematic drug use, or a myriad of other issues on the bilateral agenda, in effective and sustainable ways. Unfortunately, Trump’s recent tariff announcement exemplifies his view of the U.S.-Mexico relationship as a narrow and transactional one, in which he will use threats to coerce commitments that he can present publicly as political victories, even though they may in fact perpetuate the very challenges they purport to solve – all with little regard for the human costs.
For more information listen to our podcast episode.
