Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists and drug runners.” He has repeatedly called for building a wall between Mexico and the United States, and having Mexico pay for it. Trump even pledged he would never eat Oreo cookies again after learning that its parent company was moving operations to Mexico.
So it is perhaps not a shock that Trump’s newly unveiled immigration plan—which vows to end birthright citizenship, seize all remittances to Mexico, and immediately deport all illegal immigrants—is willfully unrealistic, insanely expensive, and infuriating to Mexico and its people.
The Mexican government fired back condemning the plan in no uncertain terms.
“We continue to stand by our position that these comments reflect prejudice, racism or plain ignorance,” the country’s foreign ministry said in a statement. “Anyone who understands the depth of the US-Mexico relationship realizes that those proposals are not only prejudiced and absurd, but would be detrimental to the well-being of both societies.”
To Mexicans both in Mexico and the US, Trumps comments are getting scarier and scarier. ”His comments sound to me like Germany in the 1930s, when they made Jews responsible for everything that was happening,” Gustavo Vega Canovas, a professor of international studies at the College of Mexico, told the Washington Post.
Author Hector Tobar writes in The New York Times that Trump has become a new boogeyman for Latino children in the United States (and a top-selling piñata along the border).
Meanwhile, Trump continues to top polls for the Republican nomination, even making the cover of Time magazine. As over-the-top as he seems, he is undeniably shaping the GOP primary race—much to the chagrin of Republican strategists. They warn that his hard-line stance is alienating Latinos, a key constituency in the election. Furthermore, Trump’s plan is pushing the other candidates to ramp up their own anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Yet some conservative pundits, like commentator Ann Coulter even think his immigration plan, scary and offensive to Mexicans, is genius: