President Trump has announced a deal with Mexico to tamp down the migrant surge in exchange for the U.S. not slapping tariffs on its southern neighbor. According to the New York Times :

WASHINGTON — President Trump backed off his plan to impose tariffs on all Mexican goods and announced via Twitter on Friday night that the United States had reached an agreement with Mexico to reduce the flow of migrants to the southwestern border.

Mr. Trump tweeted the announcement only hours after returning from Europe and following several days of intense and sometimes difficult negotiations between American and Mexican officials in Washington.

The U.S. gets something, Mexico gets something, and the dealmaker in chief got the deal entirely done while he was otherwise busy in Europe.

House Democrats? Not so much. These leftist crazies have blocked money for a wall, forcing Customs and Border Patrol agents to catch migrants by hand. They aren't going to help with a border wall, and now their left-wing activist buddies are tying the matter up in court, while their media handmaidens are cranking out the individual migrant sob stories to make Trump's bid to protect the U.S. border look like the act of a heel.

Now they're blocking even detention center money for the benefit of detained migrants who've broken U.S. immigration law. According to the Washington Post, the border surge, with its 144,000 apprehensions has created immense budget pressure:

The Trump administration is canceling English classes, recreational programs and legal aid for unaccompanied minors staying in federal migrant shelters nationwide, saying the immigration influx at the southern border has created critical budget pressures. The Office of Refugee Resettlement has begun discontinuing the funding stream for activities — including soccer — that have been deemed "not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation," said Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber. Federal officials have warned Congress that they are facing "a dramatic spike" in unaccompanied minors at the southern border and have asked Congress for $2.9 billion in emergency funding to expand shelters and care. The program could run out of money in late June, and the agency is legally obligated to direct funding to essential services, Weber said.

You'd think that would be a no-brainer for them, given their professed sympathies for illegally present foreigners. But as always, the illegals are just a tool, and if they can be useful for media sob stories without their soccer balls, all the better in the minds of Democrats — anything to be lazy and shiftless on appropriating the necessary funds. (The sob stories, by the way, are pretty amazing, with media reports that migrants will have to go without soccer balls now. Unasked questions: Do they really need new soccer balls every month? Do they use them up that quickly? Can't they use last month's soccer balls? How about one of the migrants with plenty of money to pay human-smugglers springs for a soccer ball instead?)

They've also denied additional money to hire more Border Patrol agents to process the illegals surge, even as it shows no signs of peaking, with 144,000 arrested for illegal entry just last month. They'd rather heap the extra work onto the border agents and keep the border enforcement ineffective. The heck they're going to give extra money for more agents even as the border surges.

They even threw forward new incentives to come here illegally, by rewarding DREAMers already here with legalization and a path to citizenship, which, by extension, would include the illegal alien parents who brought them here. Way to make people want to follow the law. Democrats continue to make it more attractive to migrants to come here illegally than legally.

But as this clown show keeps going on in Washington, now we have Mexico, finally doing something that recognizes reality on the border along with its own interests.

Mexico has agreed that migrant surges are the work of cartel human-smuggling syndicates, and those syndicates make money. They're targeting these groups' big-dollar bank accounts.

They also recognize that the leftists encouraging migrant surges are also not quite as humanitarian as they claim to be. The activists are also making big money — by shaking down migrants. The Mexicans have arrested some of the caravan figureheads, including Pueblos Sin Fronteras' loudmouth leader Irinio Mujica for these very migrant shakedowns as part of its stepped up border security deal.

The Mexicans now also recognize that their own southern border is a joke, a figure of fun, something a wave of migrants can push right through, as happened last year when a Honduran flag–waving migrant caravan pushed through as Mexican security officials helplessly stood by. That's some sovereignty you've got there, Mexico, given that your army is so easily pushed around by Honduran construction workers... As a result of its deal with Trump, Mexico now recognizes the need to place 6,000 troops at its southern border, saving its pride in the process.

Finally, Mexico seems to recognize that a security deal is the only condition under which a trade deal can really work. As Robert Young Pelton has written in the past, the foremost of human rights is the right to personal security. You can't have trade, or anything, really, without that precondition. This is as applicable to nations as it is to people, and the current deal is what make the upcoming NAFTA update deal, which ought to be good for both countries, now possible.

Mexico continues to bill its cooperation as concern for the "humanitarian crisis" on the border, given that its leftist government seems to think it needs to save face. They're effectively claiming: 'We're the humanitarian ones, Trump's the meanie' as they go along with the Trump deal. Fine and dandy. The bottom line is that Mexico agreed to do something to halt the border surge and that places Mexico and the U.S. now on the same side, which is the right condition for trade relations. Mexico gets something, America gets something. And the borders have a fighting chance of meaning something now.

But now we return to the Democrats, still doing nothing, watching the Mexicans take the higher ground now as their moral betters. What an embarrassment to the U.S. that Mexico has to clean up after them.

Image credit: CBS This Morning screen shot via shareable YouTube.