HEIDI FISKE | Risks Created by Trump's Trashing Mexico (Post 1 of 2)

Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto with China's President
Xi Jinping, September 2017.

The following guest post was written for CityEconomist by Heidi S. Fiske.

There is a looming menace from Mexico, but it is none of the ones identified by Trump. The threat is not one of drug dealers, rapists, and murderers flooding across our borders. It is not MS 13. It is not jobs lost to Mexican workers or Mexican factories or Mexican steel.

They are flyspecks compared with the real danger that Trump is creating by his relentless insults, as well as his threats to NAFTA, his proposed tariffs, his cancelling of DACA, and his insistence that Mexico pay for a border wall. And to add insult to injury, he has just announced his plan to send Jared Kushner (who just lost his White House security clearance) to Mexico tomorrow to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The real menace is the strategic threat to our security that an emboldened China may pose, using an alienated Mexico as its base.

China has recently, sweepingly, broadened its Latin American ties. And just as it has gotten stronger on the world stage and filled some of the vacuum created by Trump’s unilateralism, it has not, as the US hoped, gotten more democratic. On the contrary, it has tightened authoritarian control, flexing new muscle against foreign enterprises on its soil, and forcing western news outlets to limit what Chinese citizens can see. Most strikingly, on February 25, China's Premier Xi Jinping arrogated the power to rule for life by abolishing the two-term limit that had been the law. The National People’s Congress is expected to rubber stamp his decision this week.

Does China as a major force in Mexico sound unlikely? To be sure, it will not happen fast. But a look at the history of aggression from the south, and of China’s recent moves, shows that it is a geopolitical threat of such potential magnitude that we should be vigorously working to counter it now.

“Bad Uncle Sam”

But Trump is doing the opposite, and thereby encouraging Mexico to turn away from the United States, however reluctantly. His insistence that Mexico pay for the wall, for instance, has caused Peña Nieto to cancel two trips to the United States, most recently last month.

And on March 1, career diplomat Roberta Jacobson, our highly respected ambassador to Mexico, announced she would quit in May. As Trump has not even proposed a candidate for Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, her departure leaves us particularly depleted in Latin American diplomacy on the highest levels.

To be sure, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has recently made a five-country tour of Latin America to try to placate leaders there, but with limited success. “This is a way for Tillerson to say, ‘We’re elevating our voice,’” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, the director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego. But, “this is the ‘bad Uncle Sam’ of the past,” he added. “The horrendous insults to Mexicans, to every single Latin American immigrant, are there. They cannot have it both ways.”

The Trump Shock and Mexican Response

Reportedly much of retiring Ambassador Jacobson’s time has had to be spent smoothing ruffled feathers rather than accomplishing substantive gains in Mexico.

“With his tweets Trump has torn up 20 years of good relations,” said a Mexican friend as we drank afternoon tea in her kitchen a year ago. “It is as if your gentle father suddenly slapped you across the face for no reason. You don’t leave the family but you are certainly wary, and waiting to see what happens next.”

What has happened since is, if anything, worse. Last week I checked in with Warren Hardy, an American who became a Mexican citizen in 1990. Beginners at his Spanish language school in San Miguel de Allende are treated to an hour-long history lesson designed to impress on them that Mexicans are inordinately sensitive to being insulted. Mexicans, he explains, have great pride in their indigenous cultures on the one hand, but have been brutally treated successively by the Aztecs, Spanish and most recently the US on the other. The result is that “the core value of the Mexican people is respect. Mexicans demand respect from each other and particularly from foreigners.  What Mr. Trump has done is strike a blow at the heart of our relationship by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals."

Small wonder that Mexico’s leaders are looking for new partners. When Trump renewed his threat to scrap NAFTA late last August, slamming Mexico in the process, the very next week Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto travelled to China to discuss increased trade. While there, he participated with 800 business leaders  in a summit of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which Mexico might join to cooperate on investment, trade, finance, and the sea.  And the day after that Peña Nieto visited the Alibaba Group, hoping to get more Mexican products onto this China-based leading e-commerce platform.

Could increased trade with China morph into Mexicans being receptive to becoming a base for aggression against the United States? Consider events a century ago.

The Zimmermann Telegram

In January 1917, Germany’s Foreign Office proposed to the Mexican government that, if the US entered World War I against Germany, the Mexicans should fight on the German side, thus making it a two-front war for the US. In return, Germany would recover Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico for Mexico.

The famous Zimmermann Telegram that conveyed this offer was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence, which shared it with America in March of 1917. It backfired mightily on the Germans. So enraged was the American public that President Wilson went before Congress and swiftly won a declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917.

As it happened, Mexico turned Germany down, not believing that it could deliver either financially or militarily on its promise, or that Mexico could control the large English-speaking territories it might have re-acquired. But there was fertile ground among Mexicans to accept an offer that promised revenge on the United States, just as there is today. It was not just because the United States had seized almost half of Mexico in the Nineteenth Century. The United States had invaded Mexico in 1914 to protect US business interests during the Mexican revolution, and again in 1916-17 in a vain attempt to punish Pancho Villa for killing Americans in New Mexico.

While this German effort fizzled, 45 years later, a military threat from the south, from Cuba, became very real indeed.

In my next post, following shortly, we examine that threat, how much worse it would be if it were repeated today, and just how China is moving into Latin America.

This is Post 1 of 2. The second post is here:
https://cityeconomist.blogspot.com/2018/03/heidi-fiske-mexico-vector-for-chinese.html

IMMIGRATION | Centennial of Immigration Act

In practice, the literacy test kept out
fewer than 1,500 

Vero Beach, Fla., Feb. 5, 2017–This day 100 years ago, Congress mustered more than the two-thirds majority in both houses required to override President Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the previous week.

It passed the Immigration Act, one of the rare times that Congress has overridden a Presidential veto. Congress has prevailed over fewer than one-tenth of vetoes.

The law required a literacy test for immigrants and barred Asian laborers, except those from countries like the Philippines with special U.S. ties. The law went into effect May 1, 1917.

Immigration Largely Unrestricted before 1917

Through the first century of American independence, immigration into the United States was largely unrestricted. This open-door policy changed during the 1870s and 1880s. In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act barred the immigration of Chinese workers and a general immigration act barred entry to persons judged likely to become "public charges.”

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States received a majority of the world’s immigrants. Most seeking entrance continued to be accepted. Between 1892 and 1924, some 16 million people entered and settled in the United States to seek a better life, increasing the nation's population by 25 percent.

In 1894, the Immigration Restriction League in Boston petitioned the U.S. government to legislate that immigrants be required to demonstrate literacy in some language. Congress passed such a literacy bill in 1897, but President Grover Cleveland vetoed it. The Immigration Act of 1917 was the first federal law to impose a general restriction on immigration in the form of a literacy test. It also broadened restrictions on the immigration of Asians and persons deemed "undesirable” and provided tough enforcement provisions.

The Immigration Acts of 1903, 1907, and 1910 added rules to exclude persons with mental and physical defects, persons with tuberculosis, and anarchists. However, literacy riders to the immigration laws were vetoed by Presidents Grover Cleveland (1896), William Howard Taft (1913) and Woodrow Wilson two years earlier (1915).

The Immigration Act of 1917 updated and codified much of previous immigration legislation, repealing the Immigration Acts of 1903, 1907, and 1910.  It contained 38 subsections and took up 25 pages in the Congressional Session Laws. Congress overrode Wilson's second veto of the proposed Act.

Literacy Test, Higher Head Tax, More "Undesirables"

Reflecting public hostility to southern and eastern European immigrants, the act required all adult immigrants to demonstrate an ability to read; any language would do. This provision was promoted by isolationist Rep. John Lawson Burnett of Alabama, who is also remembered as one of the few who voted against going to war against Germany. Literacy testing had also been promoted by some woman suffragists as a way of speeding up passage of a Federal Amendment recognizing the right of women to vote. (Fewer than 1,500 foreigners seeking to be admitted to the United States are said to have been excluded by the literacy test.)

Besides adding this literacy test, the law increased the head tax to $8 (equivalent to $150 today), which was a significant  barrier for impoverished refugees. The act expanded categories of "undesirable aliens” to include: "idiots, imbeciles, and feeble-minded persons;” persons of "constitutional psychopathic inferiority;” "mentally or physically defective” persons; the insane; alcoholics; persons with epilepsy, tuberculosis or contagious diseases; paupers and vagrants; criminals; prostitutes; anarchists; polygamists; political radicals; and contract laborers.

The Immigration Act barred most immigration from Asia. Chinese immigrants were already barred by the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the Japanese by the Gentlemen’s Agreement. In addition, the act created the "Asiatic Barred Zone,” which encompassed India, Afghanistan, Persia (now Iran), Arabia, parts of the Ottoman Empire and Russia, Southeast Asia, and the Asian-Pacific islands.

The act contained extensive provisions for enforcement. Penalties were imposed on any persons or corporations who encouraged or assisted the immigration of persons barred by the act or contract laborers.

The law can be explained, in part, by:

1. Disruptions caused by prior immigration in the first decade of the 20th century – nearly 8.8 million people in 1901-1910, adding one new American for every eight residents in the United States in 1900. In 1907 alone, 1.3 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island. 
2. Eugenics theories then popular that categorized individuals and races as superior and inferior. Adolf Hitler didn't write Mein Kampf in a vacuum.
3. Nativist sentiments exacerbated by America's entry into World War I.

The 1917 law slowed down the rate of immigration. But another 5.7 million immigrants were added in 1911-1920, and in 1920-21 the rate was back up to that of the first decade. In 1924 a more restrictive law was passed requiring immigrant inspection in countries of origin, leading to the closure of Ellis Island and other major immigrant processing centers. The immigration quotas begun in 1924 turned out to be more effective at controlling the numbers of new Americans.

DoD Retirees Slam Waste, Errors

Read the stunning new book from the Center for Defense Information (CDI) on the budgeting weaknesses and strategic blunders of the DoD. It's a remarkably good read as well as offering a buffet of common-sense reforms for the new President and Congress.

Rep. Barney Frank has already called for a 25 percent cut in the military budget. That may be hard to do right away because of the overstretched troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the new book shows lots of ways that the out-of-control military budget can be reined in for more security at less cost.

The book, America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress, is out just two weeks after the election, exemplifying one of the themes that runs through it, namely the importance of speed and the ponderous nature of our military organization, which is critiqued as stuck in the second generation of four generations of warfare. The eleven chapters of the book are written by 13 retired Pentagon insiders, retired military officers and defense specialists. The book is edited by Winslow T. Wheeler (photo at left), Director of CDI's Straus Military Reform Project. CDI has itself found a home in the World Security Institute. Wheeler worked for 31 years for U.S. Senators from both political parties and the Government Accountability Office. His earlier book, The Wastrels of Defense, was published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press.

The book (a 2.3 meg pdf file) can be read for time being online at http://tinyurl.com/6ylwfw. I have been up most of the night reading it - it is fascinating.

The scope of the first chapter by Lt. Col. John Sayers (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.) is global and deeply rooted in history. He observes that for most of human history wars have been fought in first-generation mode, with independently assembled military units engaged in close order drills. The Thirty Years War, largely a battle between Catholics and Protestants, led to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ushered in the era of the dominance of nation states.

The second generation of warfare began at the end of the 19th century with the rivalry between Germany and Britain. The industrialized states were able to raise their firepower and support large battalions. This was the mode of battle of World War I, a war of attrition in Europe that was disastrous for all the combatants (the United States came late to the war and still lost 250,000 troops in Europe - while the major powers in Europe lost many more).

Already at the end of World War I, with their forces depleted, the Germans were trying a third generation of warfare, decentralized and maneuverable. Sayers says that this approach was used by the Germans effectively in World War II and was imitated by the Chinese in Korea and by the Viet Cong.

Nowadays, we are engaged largely in a fourth-generation war. With a loss of nation-state controls in many parts of the world, independent paramilitary groups have arisen, such as FARC in Colombia, or al Qaeda, or the Chechen rebels in Russia. Parts of Iraq are controlled by independent Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish forces. It's a reversion to the days before the Treaty of Westphalia. The independent groups behave the way SPECTRE does in the Ian Fleming novels - they have specific objectives and they fight to achieve them.

Sayers says we should have moved a long time ago to third-generation and fourth-generation readiness - with smaller and more maneuverable forces. He does not think the large nations have any interest in another war of attrition of the size that the United States prepared for during the Cold War.

Why has the United States been stuck in a century-old military strategy, spending too much money for too little ability to wage a modern war? Here are some of the reasons he advances:

- Budget gaming - frontloading and political engineering of weapons systems (Gordon Adams wrote about this 30 years ago in The Iron Triangle), with the result that the weapons are too big, too complex and unreliable.
- U.S. military forces are led by officers who are inadequately trained to lead, contributing to tbe unpreparedness of the troops.
- Defense costs rise faster than defense budgets and have become "ruinously expensive." Sayers ends the chapter describing the U.S. military creature as a "weak-muscled elephant that cannot even deal effectively with mice."

The other ten chapters go on in the same vein, urging reassessment of the way that war-making decisions are made, the military personnel system, overdependence on foreign bases, lack of mobility of forces on sea and land, overdependence on technicians, excessive faith in the value of strategic bombing as opposed to air-to-air and close-support operations, misuse of the National Guard for overseas duty, excessive faith in technology and inadequate tracking of defense spending.

Read the book! Here's the link again to the free online file while it works: http://tinyurl.com/6ylwfw.