In case you haven’t heard, Mexico has a new president: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. He won’t actually take office until December, but he has already begun maneuvering to attack his agenda out of the gates.

As part of that initiative, he wrote Trump a 12-page letter outlining his hopes in American-Mexican relations. They mostly include border security, migration and trade. That’s not surprising, but what might leave your jaw on the floor are the specific policies he mentioned to achieve these goals. Suffice it to say, we might be looking at a brand new Mexico.

Immigration

The first major difference with the new president is that he is majorly departing from the last decade or so of Mexican policy. He has expressed a stern commitment to reducing migration from Mexico to the United States. As far as he is concerned, that goes for both legal and illegal immigration.

He wants to partner with the U.S. on border security and has even expressed a desire to spend as much as 25 percent of Mexico’s annual budget on border security. That’s pretty much unheard of in modern Mexico.

We’ll go over some of the details of how he plans to accomplish this in a minute, but the primary goal is to reduce the need for immigration by improving Mexico’s economy. Whether or not he succeeds, so far he is more of a partner on U.S.-Mexico border security than we’ve seen in a long time.

Economics

Every Mexican president promises economic reform. Some said they would do it through killing the drug trade. Others promised more entitlement programs.

Obrador is noticeably different from those who came before him. His primary objective is to grow the economy through shrinking taxes, cutting government excess, improving global trade deals and investing heavily in infrastructure.

Some of that might sound familiar. Just, don’t tell the progressives. They aren’t ready to acknowledge that Trump 2.0 is now running Mexico.

More specific to his policy, Obrador wants to cut business taxes in his country. He wants to balance the budget by meeting those cuts with reductions in federal staffing and wages. He himself wants a wage cut as a part of the deal. He then wants to restructure the budget to focus primarily on education, infrastructure and border security. It’s a multi-pronged approach to stimulate growth within Mexico’s borders.

But, he isn’t stopping there. He’s also proclaimed his goals on international trade. He’s already approached Trump about accelerating NAFTA negotiations.

He’s also hinted that he would be willing to include Central American countries in the talks. One of his main points is that reducing poverty and crime in Central America will help with the migration crises. It would also reduce many sources of strain on Mexico that he says stem from those countries.

He’s Considered Progressive

It’s important to acknowledge that Obrador is not Trump. He is not fighting for the United States of America. He’s fighting for Mexico, and there will be plenty of points where his goals will not align with ours. That said, his policy sounds more Trumpian than anything else we’ve heard recently. It’s almost as if he’s witnessed Trump’s success and copied the playbook. The most extraordinary thing about this, though, is that he’s billed as a progressive.

That’s no joke. In America, the far-left loves this guy. The trick is that he is very careful with his language. He always talks about migrants and the suffering poor as victims. Because of the nature of his words, the progressives eat it up. It doesn’t matter that every policy he’s listed is extremely conservative by both Mexican and international standards. Leftist Americans are proving that they don’t value substance at all. They’ll stick to anyone who says nice things. That might be a side-effect of their tactics against Trump.

Ultimately, we have to pair these goals with realism. Mexico doesn’t have the economic baseline to see explosive growth like Trump has brought to the U.S. These new policies are sure to do a fair bit of good within Mexico, but they still have an overwhelming drug cartel problem. They also lack capital to kick things into motion. Obrador will hopefully be able to work on these points he’s made, but progress in Mexico will be slower than anyone would prefer.

In the end, securing the border will require far more investment from us than them. Still, it’s nice to see other world leaders coming around to the Trump way of thinking.

~ Freedom News Report