Our patience has been rewarded because the solution to the border crisis that we’ve been waiting for has finally arrived.
Despite all of the obstruction and dismissal by the Democrats of the worst humanitarian crisis to ever hit our border, Donald Trump has found perhaps the most effective way to solve this crisis.
The madness at the border will end. The flood of human traffickers, drug smugglers, and gang members will be stopped. The mockery that these criminal invaders have made of our immigration laws and our generous asylum system will be rectified.
And Mexico is going to step up and help us achieve all of that.
On June 10, if the Mexican government doesn’t take effective action to stop the unprecedented number of illegal immigrants traversing its territory on their way to the U.S., Mexican goods — all Mexican goods — will be subject to a 5 percent tariff. After that, Mexico will have 20 days to comply before the tariff goes up to 10 percent, after which point it will be raised an additional 5 percent every month until it reaches 25 percent on October 1.
We’re done with excuses. The U.S. has been asking Mexico for decades to help us combat illegal immigration on the southern border. Instead, the Mexican government issued guide books to help illegal immigrants evade apprehension after crossing the border.
We know full well that Mexico could easily stop this humanitarian disaster and existential threat to the United States if it wanted. The Mexican government has simply refused to do so, preferring to let its richer northern neighbor handle the costs while exploiting the crisis as a political bargaining chip.
Our government has passively accepted this situation for many years, but that’s no longer the case. “Fix it or pay the price” — that’s the clear message of the bold policy our President just announced.
And a stiff price it will be. Mexico’s economy is much more dependent on our markets than we are on Mexico’s cheap goods — and they know it.
This is the Donald Trump we elected.
We fought, sweated, and in many cases literally bled to put Trump in the White House because he was willing to tackle challenges, such as illegal immigration, that establishment politicians have long ignored. For almost four years, we have endured insults from the mainstream media and liberal elitists who tried to humiliate us for daring to support a man who didn’t play their game and who called the flow of illegal immigration what it truly is, a massive crisis.
We refused to let their derision bother us because we knew that the 2016 election might have been our last chance to save our country.
Immigration was first and foremost in our minds because we had been watching the disaster at our border grow worse for 30 years while successive administrations did practically nothing. Many establishment politicians wouldn’t even dare to identify the problem by name. When Donald Trump came along and finally did just that, they mocked him.
We’re the ones who are laughing now, though.
The President’s opponents have made it their top priority to frustrate the Trump immigration agenda, securing broad edicts from liberal judges hand-selected by open-borders activists while obstructionist Democrats in Congress stonewalled efforts to fix our broken immigration system and secure the border.
On the tariff initiative, they won’t have that option. The authority, in this case, lies solely with the President of the United States under his inherent constitutional foreign policy power and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
This is real, this is concrete, this is drastic, and this is happening. We MAGA supporters never lost faith in Donald J. Trump, because we always knew that he would deliver what he promised — that he would solve the illegal immigration crisis and make Mexico pay for it. Yesterday, our faith was validated.
Charlie Kirk is the founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, an advocacy group for young conservatives.