TV Host Jorge Ramos: ‘Trump Got His Wish. Mexico Is Now the Wall’

Journalist Jorge Ramos and his Univision crew were briefly “arbitrarily detained” at t
ALAN DIAZ/AP
Neil Munro

Univision newscaster Jorge Ramos says President Donald Trump has persuaded Mexico to become the border wall.

Under the headline, “Trump Got His Wish. Mexico Is Now the Wall,” Ramos wrote in the February 7 issue of the New York Times:

Mexico has effectively turned into an extension of Mr. Trump’s immigration police beyond American territory. And this is the case on multiple fronts: On the southern border with Guatemala, they prevent Central American migrants from coming into Mexico; on the northern one, they block those seeking entry to the United States from leaving. The decision of Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO, to follow this approach is misguided. He should let migrants continue their journey north.

Ramos’ admission is a startling declaration of defeat by a pro-migration, Mexican-born cheerleader.

Since 2015, Ramos has loudly denounced and ridiculed Trump — and Trump has aggressively pushed back. In August 2015, for example, Trump threw Ramos out of a press conference.

Ramos’ NYT statement also undermines the jeers by his fellow progressives who claimed Trump would never get Mexico to pay for his wall. In 2015, as Trump announced his candidacy, Trump declared:

I would build a great wall. And nobody builds walls better than me, believe me. And I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.

Trump’s concrete-and-metal fence is being funded by U.S. taxpayers — but Mexico is paying for its security forces to wall off many Latino migrants from getting near Trump’s border wall.

Moreover, Ramos gives Donald Trump all the credit for Mexico’s border-wall of security forces:

Everything changed because of Donald Trump. By mid-2019, a number of Central American caravans were traveling across Mexico. The president, comparing them to an invasion, warned Mexico that they should do something to stop them, and that he would slap tariffs on all Mexican imports if it didn’t.

Despite Ramos’ comments, Mexican citizens also deserve some of the credit because they support the anti-migration policy. Ramos said:

That’s why I am surprised by the indifference shown by so many Mexicans over the abuses of the National Guard and the vicious attacks on social media aimed at Central Americans. Those xenophobic comments remind me of those I have been hearing for decades here in the United States, and of the appalling mistreatment of Mexican immigrants in recent years. Such abuses should not be forgotten or used to justify a similar treatment of migrants in Mexico.

In front of the border wall, Trump has also created a wall of asylum reforms that stretch several hundred miles southward to Central America.

The reforms allow U.S. officials to return Central American migrants to Guatemala, even before they get asylum hearings with U.S. judges. The return policy means that U.S. officials do not have to release migrants into the United States — which means the migrants know they will not be able to earn U.S. dollars to repay their smuggling debts to the cartels.

Trump’s legal wall is not complete. So far, he has not developed a mechanism that would allow the easy return of economic migrants from India and Africa.

His border wall is also behind schedule — but is slated to reach 500 miles in early 2021.

Trump’s network of border defenses is reducing the inflow of foreign workers into the U.S. economy, so helping to bump up wages for Americans.

But Ramos has not given up hope that many millions of migrants will be able to push their way past Trump to get into the United States so they can watch his Spanish-language TV broadcasts:

What should Mexico be doing with migrants from Central America? Just let them go through and protect them as they do so, instead of repressing them. They are fleeing extreme poverty and gang violence. Their only hope is to get to the United States. The Trump administration, not the López Obrador administration, should be receiving them and deciding whether they should be granted political asylum.

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