By Monica Showalter www.americanthinker.com
Say what you want about President Trump, the business-magnate-turned-president always did understand the art of the deal.
So when a migrant surge in 2019 migrant inundated U.S. borders from the south, Trump showed Mexico he meant business by shutting the U.S.-Mexico border as leverage in order to cut a deal with them to stop the migrants.
How the critics howled.
Here's the local public radio station, KPBS, report dated April 4, 2019:
President Trump's threats to close the border have slowed cross-border commerce at the country's busiest port of entry, despite his comments Thursday indicating he intended to give Mexico a year to stop the flow of migrants to the U.S.
Local business leaders fear the effect could be long-term.
"It's actually worse to have this threat renewed for a year versus resolving it now," said Paola Avila, vice president of international business affairs for the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce. "I consider it very detrimental."
Avila said businesses usually plan out investments years ahead of time, and that she foresees his comments having a chilling effect.
More than 100,000 people cross the San Diego-Tijuana border every day to go to school or work, to see a doctor or to go shopping. And many industries in San Diego depend on trade with Mexico. If Trump closes the border, people's lives — and the regional economy — would be interrupted. Some businesses are already seeing an impact from the mere threat of a border closure.
"Just the threats alone, that in itself is creating a problem," said Frank Carrillo, president of SIMNSA, a health care provider that offers medical and dental services in Tijuana for U.S. citizens from San Diego, Los Angeles and other areas. "People don't want to make the trip."
The pain was real, but it didn't last long -- Trump got the Mexicans' attention and within days, a deal was cut with Mexico to halt the migrant caravans and permit "asylum seekers" from third countries to wait out their asylum claims in Mexico.
Supply chains are important things and the Mexicans are no fools. Acting in their best interests, they decided to prioritize trade over tweaking Uncle Sam by dispatching tens of thousands of migrants from multiple countries into the U.S. illegally.
In the end, both sides went away happy and illegal immigration shrank precipitously. The border traffic came back, stronger than ever. That little shutdown done for leverage was the art of the deal.
Which now brings us to Joe Biden, who also shut the border down ... by opening the border to all comers.
According to NBC San Diego:
In San Diego and Texas border cities this week, officials closed border crossings so agents could help with an influx of migrants.
After a dip in illegal crossings
that followed new asylum restrictions in May, President Joe Biden's
administration is again on its heels. Democratic mayors and governors are
seeking more relief for hosting asylum-seekers and Republicans are seizing on
the issue ahead of 2024 elections.
In San Diego, a pedestrian crossing has been closed since Sept. 14 to direct staff to an area where migrants from Cameroon to Colombia were waiting between a double-layer border wall in San Diego. Volunteers are handing the migrants food and bottled water while they wait to be processed.
Near Jacumba Hot Springs, a town of less than 1,000 people with a small hotel and general store within boulder-strewn mountains an hour's drive east of San Diego, migrants camps began forming last week for the first time since May.
So to be clear -- Trump shut down the border to reduce illegal migrants flowing into the U.S.
Biden also shut down the border in a reactive response to illegal migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally.
In both instances, the door to trade was halted.
But only Trump got a deal to stop it.
Biden's border shutdowns which are the result of depleted Border Patrol manpower have put cross-border trade second, and what's worse, the shutdown comes with no deal whatsoever, only the open-ended prospect of more migrants and more border shutdowns as agents are diverted to the care and feeding of illegals.
A business group sounded the alarm about this, and rightly so:
EL PASO, Texas – The Border Trade Alliance wants Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to quickly open a dialogue with his counterpart in Mexico to address what it describes as a worsening situation at the US-Mexico border.
The BTA, a grassroots, non-profit organization, says a recent surge of migrants has resulted in closures of critical trade arteries.
“The BTA is deeply concerned that cross-border trade and commerce will be severely delayed unless both governments come together to restore order and security at the border,” BTA President Ms. Britton Mullen said. “Closures of international bridges and ports of entry result in tremendous economic harm to businesses on both sides of the border and degrade the quality of life throughout the region.”
Trump closed the border in order to get a deal to stop the migrants. Biden on the other hand, also closed the border -- because he wouldn't cut a deal. He chose lose-lose instead. And naturally, he didn't plan it, it just ... happened.
It's strange how symmetrical these border trade shutdowns really are. As long as migrants surge, trade doesn't surge, trade gets shut down, which ought to be a lesson for everyone.
But what isn't symmetrical is Trump's insistence on a win-win situation for both sides, and Biden's insistence on a lose-lose result.
If this isn't proof of Biden's idiocy, what is? Biden has opted to get all the pain of a border shutdown and none of the benefits, all to preserve the chaos of his open border. It's the hill he means to die on and may be the stupidity that will sweep him from office.
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