#OyVeyDonald Trump Mexico starts work on huge tunnels along US border

Tijuana (dpo) - What is Mexico’s endgame? Widespread media reporting has today shown construction workers contracted by the Mexican government clearly starting work on huge tunnels at several points along the US border. Each site is located just a few 100 yards from the border. Diggers and construction vehicles are hard at work moving earth, yet it is currently not clear where the tunnels will lead and the government refused to answer questions from the media.Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is quoted as saying, “It’s nobody’s business. We can dig as many tunnels as we like in our own country. The infrastructure plans we are working on in Mexico, on our own territory, have nothing to do with anybody else.”Inside sources reveal that some of the tunnels are expected to be several miles long based on the amounts of construction materials purchased. Blueprints were leaked to the Postillon, allowing us to create this image of how the completed tunnels might look:

Several state-subsidised paragliding schools have also appeared on high ground in the area, as well as companies offering trips in captive balloons, “so that Mexican citizens can better enjoy the particular natural features of the region”, according to an official statement. The Mexican government remains secretive as to the purpose of this mammoth construction project but not about its funding: “the USA will bear the cost of the tunnels”, explains Peña Nieto.

Oy Vey God Save America from Donny T. What a Fertummelt Fercockt Shmendrik Donald Trump Revealed How He'll Force Mexico to Pay for the Wall, and It's Pretty Nuts

Donald Trump finally outlined a plan for funding his oft-discussed behemoth wall across the Mexican border on Tuesday, and it's about as wild as you'd expect.

The Republican frontrunner has been bellowing about the wall for a while now as part of his angry pitch about scary immigrants. But a two-page memo released to the Washington Post represents his first attempt at providing a strategy for getting the thing built—besides broadsides about making Mexico pay.

That's still basically the plan, though.

Seeing as how the former president of Mexico has already made it clear to Trump that the country won't just "pay for that fucking wall," the Donald has hatched a strong-armed business scheme that might have come straight from the pages of The Art of the Deal.

Here's how he's going to make Mexico pay for the Great Wall of Trump in three days or less:

On day one, Trump will lean on provisions of the Patriot Act to block some wire transfers from the US to Mexico, preventing immigrants from sending cash home without proof that they are legal. (Some experts the Post talked to are skeptical he can even make this happen under current law, but whatever.)

On day two, according to Trump, Mexico will erupt in protests, since immigrants in the US are—according to him—responsible for about $24 billion flowing into Mexico each year. (Trump's a little confused, since that number actually refers to the amount of money sent into Mexico from the rest of the world, not just the US.) When that alleged flow of money stops, Trump basically suspects riots won't be far behind.

The Mexican government, faced with a country of enraged citizens, will then be given the chance to kick President Trump a "one-time payment of $5–10 billion" to keep the wire transfers flowing from the US to Mexico. (That's day three.)

The multi-billion dollar payment from Mexico will go toward building expenses for the wall, and well, there you go.

"We have the moral high ground here, and all the leverage," Trump writes in his strangely crumpled memo, which includes mention of drugs and gangs. "It is time we use it in order to Make America Great Again."

Oy Vey God Save America from Donny T. What a Fertummelt Fercockt Shmendrik Donald Trump Revealed How He'll Force Mexico to Pay for the Wall, and It's Pretty Nuts

Donald Trump finally outlined a plan for funding his oft-discussed behemoth wall across the Mexican border on Tuesday, and it's about as wild as you'd expect.

The Republican frontrunner has been bellowing about the wall for a while now as part of his angry pitch about scary immigrants. But a two-page memo released to the Washington Post represents his first attempt at providing a strategy for getting the thing built—besides broadsides about making Mexico pay.

That's still basically the plan, though.

Seeing as how the former president of Mexico has already made it clear to Trump that the country won't just "pay for that fucking wall," the Donald has hatched a strong-armed business scheme that might have come straight from the pages of The Art of the Deal.

Here's how he's going to make Mexico pay for the Great Wall of Trump in three days or less:

On day one, Trump will lean on provisions of the Patriot Act to block some wire transfers from the US to Mexico, preventing immigrants from sending cash home without proof that they are legal. (Some experts the Post talked to are skeptical he can even make this happen under current law, but whatever.)

On day two, according to Trump, Mexico will erupt in protests, since immigrants in the US are—according to him—responsible for about $24 billion flowing into Mexico each year. (Trump's a little confused, since that number actually refers to the amount of money sent into Mexico from the rest of the world, not just the US.) When that alleged flow of money stops, Trump basically suspects riots won't be far behind.

The Mexican government, faced with a country of enraged citizens, will then be given the chance to kick President Trump a "one-time payment of $5–10 billion" to keep the wire transfers flowing from the US to Mexico. (That's day three.)

The multi-billion dollar payment from Mexico will go toward building expenses for the wall, and well, there you go.

"We have the moral high ground here, and all the leverage," Trump writes in his strangely crumpled memo, which includes mention of drugs and gangs. "It is time we use it in order to Make America Great Again."

The “Mexico sends them” myth: Trump’s not just racist but channeling far-right immigration conspiracies

The “Mexico sends them” myth: Trump’s not just racist but channeling far-right immigration conspiracies .The absurd notion that Mexico is sending immigrants here is central to the framework that shapes Trump's worldview ... a worldview in cohoots with the lunatic Alt Right... Minutemen and the Klu Klax Klan

Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/David Becker)

Everyone knows that Donald Trump has called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and criminals. But what he actually articulated in his infamous June 2015 announcement speech was not just standard racism but a profoundly bizarre conspiracy theory with roots in the far-right white nationalist anti-immigrant movement.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

His theory: “The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States.”

The idea is not that Mexicans are all rapists, but that the Mexican government is intentionally selecting their social refuse and offloading them on the United States. It might not be as offensive as his calling immigrants rapists but it’s an important window into how Trump thinks. This aspect of Trump’s theory on why immigrants come, however, is often overshadowed by his scathing characterization of who immigrants are.

But the notion that the Mexican government is sending immigrants here is part and parcel of a conspiracist framework that shapes Trump’s entire worldview and approach to governance: dull-witted American leaders, he repeatedly intones, are being duped and outwitted by foreigners. A Trump presidency will school those leaders in the art of the deal.

“Our leaders are stupid, our politicians are stupid, and the Mexican government is much smarter, much sharper, much more cunning, and they send the bad ones over because they don’t want to pay for them, they don’t want to take care of them,” Trump said in the first Republican primary debate in August 2015. “Why should they, when the stupid leaders of the United States will do it for them? And that’s what’s happening, whether you like it or not.”


VIDEOThe New York Times - Donald Trump Changes His Mind
In fact, the notion that the Mexican government is orchestrating an invasion of the United States has been a staple on the white nationalist far right for years.

“This is a longstanding conspiracy on the radical right,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “There have been claims for the better part of ten years now that Mexico is secretly planning to reconquer the American Southwest.”

That conspiracy to take over the Southwest goes by the names Plan de Aztlán (taken from a 1969 Chicano movement manifesto) and “the Reconquista,” or Reconquest. One theory is that it will happen through the “birth canal,” meaning that Mexican women are being sent to the United States to give birth to lots of children and take power through sheer demographic force. The other is that it will take place through force of arms. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, one of the most extreme but influential anti-immigrant organizations, has lent its support to the theory.

“It boils down to the claim that Mexico is consciously infiltrating its citizens into the United States in order to take back the lands lost to the Americans,” said Potok.

A 2006 article in FrontPage Magazine, an Alt Right Wing online publication,for example, described “the Mexican invasion of the United States” as “a campaign to occupy and gain power over our country — a project encouraged, abetted, and organized by the Mexican state and supported by the leading elements of Mexican society.”

In 2005, anti-immigrant advocates seized on the Mexican government’s distribution of a safety guide to migrants as evidence that the government was coordinating their outmigration for the economic purpose of ensuring remittances. Rick Oltman of FAIRreportedly said the books were evidence of “the Mexican government trying to protect its most valuable export, which is illegal migrants.”

The theory probably originated, said Potok, in a small group called American Patrol, based in Southern Arizona, and was popular amongst Minutemen anti-immigrant militiamen during their heyday, from the mid to late 2000s.

“It’s a conspiracy theory that began on a tiny hate group on the Arizona that has spread far and wide and quite deeply penetrated the mainstream,” said Potok.

In 2014, a video circulated of a man who described himself as a former Border Patrol agent, who charged that the influx of refugee children was an act of “asymmetrical warfare” carried out by unnamed malignant forces so that they could sneak in drugs and chemical and biological weapons (he also put suggested that the Ebola outbreak in Africa was spread by intentional conspiracy). The video was cited by right-wing figures including former Congressman Allen West.

Others, including former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, accused the U.S. government of being complicit in coordinating the wave of Central American child refugees. That taps into the notion, said Potok, that President Obama wants immigrants and refugees to come to the United States because they will be future Democratic voters. It’s also part of a broader theory that dangerous forces abroad are allied with an internal fifth column of liberals who are aiding the enemy for their own nefarious purposes.

These sorts of conspiracies are not limited to immigration: the far right that has taken over the Republican Party incorporates a whole range of extreme theories rooted in the Cold War paranoia of the John Birch Society (which believed that the civil rights movement was a communist plot and more recently mainstreamed the notion that the United Nations was scheming to destroy the American way of life in the name of environmentalism) and the rantings of Alex Jones and his Infowars empire.

Trump makes a similar but even more sinister argument when he suggests that President Obama is resettling Syrian refugees because he is being fooled by a conspiracy to attack America or may be complicit in it. “Why is he so emphatic on not solving the problem?” Trump asked. “There’s something we don’t know about. There’s something we don’t know about.”

Trump’s position on free trade likewise reflects this worldview. While he does argue that global trade is organized to advantage elites at the expense of workers—echoing criticisms that are also common on the left—the centerpiece of his plan for trade is to “appoint the toughest and smartest trade negotiators to fight on behalf of American workers.”