MEXICO’S OBRADOR BLACKMAILS BIDEN
In Mexico, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO for short) knows a fool when he sees one.
So now that Joe Biden has let illegal border crossings balloon into a full-blown crisis, with millions of illegal aliens now flowing into the U.S., he’s got Biden over a barrel.
Like any sharp mafioso or three-card monte player, he’s now raising his price to solving the problem … and it won’t come cheap.
According to Newsweek:
“Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wants the United States to pay $20 billion to help curb illegal immigration.
The U.S. has experienced a drastic uptick in illegal border crossings in recent months, including 192,000 apprehensions in November on top of 9,600 additional daily migrant encounters during the first three weeks of December. Texas, Florida and New York City have been front and center the past year because of the influx and politicians redirecting them to other areas and states.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has called the Biden administration’s approach to immigration ‘an unmitigated disaster,’ traveled with 64 other House Republicans to the southern border town of Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday to tour what has been a heavily traversed area by migrants. While there, cameras caught migrants traveling through the Rio Grande River to the U.S., just a feet away from the politicians.
Obrador said during a Friday (1/05) news conference that he requested U.S. authorities to deploy the $20 billion in funds as part of a cooperative plan to help other countries in Latin America as record numbers of migrants are filing through Central America and Mexico to enter the U.S.”
The $20 billion payout is just the start.
He also has amnesty on his mind, and wants Biden to agree to amnesty for 10 million illegals in the U.S., the better to keep the poor out of his hair as well as the potential protestors to his mismanaged government, which according to one analyst, is now about half controlled by Mexico’s brutal cartels.
Keeping those people in the US not only prevents unrest, it saves on welfare, educational, medical and other costs, and with amnestied illegals able to work legally in the states, ensures a steady stream of remittances to his country. At last count, they were already at record highs and this demand could raise them significantly higher.
Oh, and AMLO always remembers his friends. He’d like the U.S. to drop all sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela for their human rights violations, democracy shutdowns, drug dealing, and money laundering. Remittances should flow to those countries too, which along with sanctions ending and even more illegals flowing north, would be a cash bonanza for those bad actors — and they’d owe Mexico for that favor.
NBC News summed it up this way:
“In a press conference on Friday (1/05), López Obrador called on the U.S. to approve a plan that would deploy $20 billion to Latin American and Caribbean countries, suspend the U.S. blockade of Cuba, remove all sanctions against Venezuela and grant at least 10 million Hispanics living in the U.S. the right to remain and work legally.
All of those are extremely tall demands of an administration headed into a re-election campaign that may hinge on how firmly Biden is able to get control of the southern U.S. border, which saw a record 300,000 migrants processed by Customs and Border Protection in December.
Responding to those requests, a senior Biden administration official told NBC News that AMLO, as López Obrador is commonly called, ‘has a very ambitious agenda. For some of these things, we would need Congress to act. We share the vision that we need to lift up the region.’
The two countries are expected to continue talks in Washington later this month. Mexico brings significant leverage to the negotiations, the U.S. and Mexican officials said.
You can see the dollar signs in AMLO’s eyes.
Now that he’s got feckless Joe cornered, he’d like things to remain just the way they are in the U.S., the better to squeeze out those expensive concessions.
NBC added:
“López Obrador’s administration would prefer that President Joe Biden win re-election in November, given Donald Trump’s rhetoric and actions during his time in office. But Biden is quickly running out of options to fix a problem that is driving down his poll numbers without increased support from Mexico, three U.S. officials told NBC News.”
That’s a campaign ad for President Trump right there.
Obviously the Mexicans know Biden is a mark they can shake down like a pinata now that he’s let the entire U.S. border fall apart. Biden might have had options had he acted earlier, things to trade like border trade itself and remittances, but well, he didn’t and now he can’t. So up the price goes.
AMLO couldn’t do that with President Trump, who vowed to shut down the border like a big daddy godfather who didn’t like pipsqueaks annoying him, sending AMLO scrambling to control his side of the border and not upset the big hombre up north, as there was no telling what he would do, except that he would do it hard.
Remittances could have been next. With that understanding established, AMLO and Trump became the most cordial of presidential colleagues.
Biden, though, is a mark, a truly rollable one, the drunk who went to Matamoros and lost his passport in the tale to the Customs agent told by Ken Kesey in Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” except not fake, but real. They’ve seen his kind.
No wonder AMLO’s team has no concern about letting it leak out that they’d like Biden to win the next election.
If Biden had any gumption at all, he never would have let the border get out of control in the first place. Now that we are three years out in a Biden term that began by opening the border, Biden’s response has been pretty obviously stupid as the Mexicans watched it unfold.
Biden started out by ignoring the crisis, lying about it, pretending it didn’t exist, and sending incompetent Kamala Harris to deal with it.
Various other measures, worsened it more, such as dropping Title 42, setting up migrant reception centers all across Latin America, employing catch and release parole to all comers, treating every asylum claim like a valid asylum case, creating an accept-all-applicants CBPOne app, and spending all border cash on “processing” illegal migrants into the country as if more checkout lines were needed instead of a wall.
That snowballed the migrant surge and created great profits for cartels and foreign governments, and the connivance of Colombian, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan, and Mexican government officials sped them on their way, anxious to draw remittances and let gringo pay the social and monetary costs of shipping their least productive citizens from their own countries to ours.
Now Biden’s flat on his back and begging for mercy, calling on Mexico to make it stop for him,. and AMLO has just raised his price.
AMLO must be wondering if there will ever be another greater idiot than Biden running the U.S. He’s likely guessing ‘no,’ and for that, recognizes that the time to take advantage is now.
This is sorry stuff and one more reason than ever for voters to stop this migrant surge and Mexico with its humiliating demands come November.
No nation should take advantage of the U.S. with demands like AMLO’s to halt a problem that a good neighbor would never permit unless he was dealing with someone who didn’t care. Obviously, Biden didn’t so they take Biden for a fool.
Monica Showalter is a journalist whose analyses have appeared in Forbes, the Asia Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, and American Thinker.