Donald Trump recently shared with the Washington Post his policy plans to force Mexico to pay for the Trump border wall.
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to force Mexico to pay for the Trump border wall. At the heart of his policy is a Draconian plan to shut off the flow of alien remittances--the electronic payments immigrants, legal or illegal, make to their families still in Mexico or anywhere else in the world.
Trump's policy--essentially international blackmail--threatens the Mexican government by turning off the southbound flow of tens of millions of American dollars that bolster local Mexican economies and help uncounted numbers of Mexican families survive. What Trump is proposing is nothing less than a protection racket, as completely transparent and clumsy in its thuggishness as any B-grade gangster movie ever portrayed.
Almost every time I shop at my neighborhood grocery, or stop into a local convenience store, I see a short line of men (mostly) and women filling out forms to accompany their small electronic payments to a family member somewhere outside the U.S. The folks I see are day laborers, shop attendants, maids, painters, food-truck chefs, clerks, nannies, shelf-stockers, warehouse loaders, caregivers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, uncles...human beings eking out a living.
Maybe they are living below the radar, maybe above. From a compassionate point of view, I don't care. To me, they are my neighbors, friends and fellow travelers on this planet. They are doing their best. And from what I've seen in my six-plus decades, they are doing a heck of a lot more toward achieving the American dream than many near-sighted, blinders-on, tiny-brained thinkers skulking in Presidential campaigns, posturing in the halls of Congress, bloviating in certain state legislatures and governors' mansions, and hating in the few remaining 17th century county clerks' offices.