A Mexican senator has plans to fight back against Donald Trump’s pledge to “make Mexico pay” for a 3,000-km wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Although details of Trump’s plan for the wall are scarce, the Republican candidate’s campaign released a memo in March saying he would “compel Mexico to pay” by cutting off remittances sent over the border by Mexicans living in the United States.

In response, Sen. Armando Rios Piter, of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution, introduced a law in the Mexican Senate last week that would retaliate with an equivalent tax on American people and companies in Mexico.

More than one million U.S. citizens live in Mexico.

“All parties in the Senate are in agreement that Mexico needs to stand up for itself and strengthen its relationship with the United States,” Rios told the Telegraph. “We want to shut Trump’s mouth, which has been spewing this hateful speech.”

Moreover, if Trump acts on his threat to unilaterally revoke the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the bill proposes to review all 75 treaties Mexico has with its northern neighbour — a move which would threaten the region’s security and prosperity. Those treaties include the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which set the current border with Texas and ceded California and parts of six other U.S. states to the U.S. in 1848.

The likelihood Trump can actually build the wall is slim. But the fact that he has built much of his campaign around anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican rhetoric has caused a tidal wave of anti-Americanism south of the Rio Grande.

When he launched his primary campaign last June, Trump called undocumented Mexicans rapists and criminals; he has run on a platform of deporting millions of illegal immigrants.

“Trump is very blatantly the most hated man in Mexico. Ninety-eight per cent of Mexicans despise him, according to a recent poll,” said Agustin Barrios Gomez, president of Mexico Image Foundation and a former congressman who helped to draft the bill.

The legislation has support from senators from the governing party, as well as from other opposition parties, and is now being debated in committee. Added Barrios Gomez: “We want Trump to know, we will fight back.”

The proposed law would also prohibit Mexico’s federal government from financing “any kind of infrastructure” that could be construed as a border wall. Mexico currently receives $24.4 billion a year in remittances from immigrants in the U.S.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s decision to invite Trump to the presidential palace Los Pinos for a visit late last month angered many Mexicans.

Though Pena Nieto later tweeted that he made it clear Mexicans would not pay for a border wall, many people felt he missed an opportunity to confront the Republican candidate. After the meeting, Trump claimed he and Pena Nieto didn’t discuss who would pay for the proposed wall.

A poll in Reforma, a daily newspaper, found that 85 per cent of Mexicans believed inviting Trump was a mistake. Following the meeting, Finance Minister Luis Videgaray Caso, a close ally of the president, resigned.

Mexicans have had a volatile relationship with the U.S., given their history, but anti-American sentiment has faded since NAFTA was signed in 1994.

“The visit may resurrect Mexico’s anti-American revolutionary nationalism and hurt the United States for years to come,” predicted political analyst Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald last Friday.

“Generations of Mexicans have grown up with school textbooks that referred to Texas and California as ‘territories usurped from Mexico by the United States’ in the 1830s and 1840s.”

Mexico and the U.S. are two of the world’s most integrated economies, with 350 million legal border crossings a year, according to the U.S. State Department. Since NAFTA was implemented, trade between the two countries has more than tripled to $700 billion. Six million U.S. jobs depend on Mexico, according to the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, a think-tank in Washington, D.C.

“The U.S. would be shooting itself in the foot” if ties between Mexico and the U.S. became strained, said Barrios Gomez. “When we say we are fighting back against Trump’s ideas, we are actually trying to safeguard the NAFTA relationship.”

Felipe Calderon, Pena Nieto’s predecessor, has called Trump a liar and a hypocrite.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Another past president, Vicente Fox, called Trump a false prophet who threatens to bring back the era of the ugly American in a February interview.

“I’m not going to pay for that f---ing wall,” Fox told Univision anchor Jorge Ramos. “He should pay for it. He’s got the money.”

Correction - September 13, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said there are 350 million legal border crossings between Mexico and the U.S. daily.



Read more about: