A Mexican official has claimed his nation will be protected from paying for any border wall proposed by GOP presidential primary front-runner Donald Trump by the “integration” of North America.
“Under no circumstance will Mexico pay for the wall that Mr. Trump is proposing,” said Mexico’s finance minister, Luis Videgaray, in a Reuters report.
“Building a wall between Mexico and the United States is a terrible idea. It is an idea based on ignorance and has no foundation in the reality of North American integration,” he said.
Trump first raised the issue of illegal aliens crossing the border from Mexico into the United States last year when he announced his bid for the GOP nomination for president.
He said he not only would build a wall to stem the flow of illegal immigration and drugs, he would have Mexico pay for it, through tariffs and other fees. Trump also accused Mexico of sending rapists and drug runners into the U.S.
In response, former Mexican presidents Felipe Calderon and Vicente Fox likened Trump to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
But the concern over illegal immigration has resonated with American voters, who have made Trump the likely nominee.
The immigration problem has been aggravated by a series of orders from the Obama administration that, if upheld in court, would allow millions of illegal aliens to remain in the United States.
‘Integration’
WND reported two years ago that the author of a book credited with exposing a move toward a “North American Union” that would include Mexico, the U.S. and Canada believes the flood of illegal aliens could be a steppingstone to that plan.
The book spotlighted the meetings of the governments of the U.S., Mexico and Canada through the Security and Prosperity Partnership, the SPP, to promote economic integration.
“We stopped the SPP simply by exposing the plan to create a North American Union,” said Jerome Corsi, author of “The Late Great U.S.A.: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada.”
At its peak, WND reported, the SPP had some 20 different working groups composed of policymakers and bureaucrats from the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. They worked in joint committees spanning a wide range of issues, from commerce, to aviation policy, to border security and immigration – all without the approval of a treaty by the Senate and without congressional approval or oversight of working group participation by dozens of U.S. federal government employees.
“Now the timetable for continental integration has slowed down,” Corsi said at the time. “The decision seems to have been made to accomplish first the integration of the United States and Mexico by leaving the southern border open to an unstopped flood of Hispanics crossing the border illegally.”
The North American Union is now regarded as “theoretical,” but the issue still surfaces now and again, including in a recent commentary questioning whether Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was a supporter of “a North American Union between Mexico, the U.S. and Canada.”
Corsi has argued that regardless of why illegal aliens enter the U.S. from the southern border, the fact remains that their presence in large numbers could make it much easier to integrate the U.S. with Mexico.
He argued America’s national identity would erode.
“The pressures for the United States not to be a sovereign nation in a 20- or 50-year period of time are almost overwhelming,” he said.
The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America has been officially inactive since 2009.
But Corsi said “the globalists will never stop.”
Corsi’s “The Late Great U.S.A.: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada,” was written two years after President George W. Bush teamed up with Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin to announce the creation of the SPP.
“As people began seeing the components of the North American Union that were coming into place, went to the SPP.gov website and read it for themselves,” Corsi said, “it produced very much of a negative reaction. People said, ‘No.’ They didn’t want a North American Union; they wanted to preserve U.S. sovereignty, and they wanted to secure the border.”
He explained, however, that the issue didn’t go away completely.
For example, in 2011, President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced an initiative to better align the two countries’ regulations and another to strengthen their shared security and ease the flow of people and products across their border.
