Billionaire Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has finally revealed how he plans to force Mexico to pay for his multibillion-dollar wall along the US southern border, a linchpin of his presidential campaign that has never been fully detailed before.



The key to the wall’s financing, Trump wrote in a two-page memo to the Washington Post, is threatening to halt money transfers from Mexican immigrants in the US to family back home. These remittances amount to nearly $25bn each year, roughly 2% of the Mexican gross domestic product, according to the World Bank. Cutting off these money transfers could doom the Mexican economy to recession and severely damage diplomatic relations.

“It’s an easy decision for Mexico,” Trump wrote in the memo, written on campaign stationary emblazoned with his “Make America Great Again!” motto. “Make a one-time payment of $5-$10bn to ensure that $24bn continues to flow into their country year after year.”

Trump has previously estimated the cost of building the wall at $8bn.

In the memo, entitled Compelling Mexico to Pay for the Wall, Trump said that on the first day of his presidency he would warn the Mexican government of a new regulation that would allow for the government’s seizure of financial assets by immigrants unless they provide documentation establishing “lawful presence in the United States”. According to Trump, “the majority” of the amount sent as remittances comes from undocumented migrants.

The feasibility and legality of such a maneuver is unclear. “Trump is giving an extremely broad definition of this section of the Patriot Act and what it allows, and it’d surely be litigated,” Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, told the Washington Post. “It would be a large expansion beyond what the text reads.”

Trump’s memo cites additional examples of diplomatic arm-twisting , including an increase in tariffs on Mexican imports, putting a halt to legal immigration and increasing fees for visas and green cards. “Immigration is a privilege, not a right,” Trump wrote. “Mexico is totally dependent on the United States as a release valve for its own poverty.”

He concluded his memo by lambasting current immigration rates, writing that “gangs, drug traffickers and cartels have freely exploited our open borders and committed vast numbers of crimes inside the United States”.

“We have the moral high ground here, and all the leverage,” Trump concluded. “It is time we use it.”

Barack Obama responded to Trump’s plan at a press briefing on Tuesday.

“Good luck with that,” the president said, citing the dangers of what he described as “half-baked notions”.

Obama told journalists that the proposal was “one more example of something that is not thought through and primarily put forward for political consumption”.

And he warned of the ramifications such a plan would have on the Mexican economy which, in turn, would drive more immigrants to flee to the US in search of jobs.

“People around the world ... don’t expect half-baked notions coming out of the White House. We can’t afford that.”

Trump’s proposal was greeted with jeers in Mexico.

“You can’t hold a country up for ransom. That’s not what Mexicans expect from a serious candidate,” said Arturo Franco, an economist and non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. “You can’t have a stupid idea [like a wall] and ask the other country to pay for it.”



The Mexican government appointed a new ambassador to the United States on Tuesday, while sending the director of international press from the president’s office to the Foreign Relations Secretariat as undersecretary for North American matters.

Analysts interpreted the moves as a signal that Mexico intends to take a more outspoken stance against Trump.

But the property magnate’s rise has spooked the country’s political and business classes, which have bet big on NAFTA and closer relations over the past two decades.

“Who have benefitted most from the deal with the US most over the last 25 years?” said Federico Estévez, political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “They’re not defending peasants. … It’s their pocketbooks that will be most affected if Trump comes to pass.”

Mexicans send more than $24bn in remittances in 2015, according to the Banco de México with much of it sustaining households and supporting relatives back home.

Outward migration has slowed since the 2008 economic crisis as job prospects dimmed in the United States and the border became increasingly fortified. The price of hiring a people-smuggler to guide a migrant across the border has soared to around $5,000 per person, while the business is now controlled by criminals, said Ellen Calmus, director of the Corner Institute, an organization which works with the families of migrants near Mexico City.

She didn’t think a wall would stop the flow of migrants since the smugglers “have control of it the cross-border flow and have found ways to get people through, including with bribery.”

Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto appeared to dismiss Trump’s proposal as campaign rhetoric.



“The [Mexican] presidency has no comment on any opinion made in the heat of the electoral process to choose candidates for the US presidency,” the president’s office said in a text message to Reuters.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report