Fox News Announces Trump Will Cut Aid to "Three Mexican Countries"
http://bit.ly/2WrfIpH
On Sunday morning, hosts Ed Henry, Jedediah Bila, and Pete Hegseth of Fox & Friends Weekend discussed Donald Trump's threat to shut down the southern border. Trump's complaint was that the Mexican government isn't doing enough to stop illegal immigration into the U.S. He also announced that the U.S. would be suspending foreign aid payments to some countries. Based on the Fox News chyron though, it's not super clear which countries those are: "TRUMP CUTS U.S. AID TO 3 MEXICAN COUNTRIES."
It's a safe bet that whoever wrote this meant to say "Central American countries," since Trump did tell reporters, according to the Washington Post, "I’ve ended payments to Guatemala, to Honduras and El Salvador. No more money is going there anymore. We were giving them $500 million. We were paying them tremendous amounts of money, and we’re not paying them anymore because they haven’t done a thing for us."
Those three countries make up the "Northern Triangle," and people from the region make up the bulk of the migrant caravans that Trump has fixated on, both before pivotal elections and after embarrassing public losses. The largest share of people crossing the border into the U.S. comes from those countries, and under Barack Obama, the State Department began directing aid to the region in an attempt to deal with the issues driving people to migrate in the first place: things like poverty, violence, political instability.
Later on in the show, Hegseth apologized, saying, "We had an inaccurate graphic on the screen while talking about this very story. We just want to be clear, the funding is being cut off to the three Central American countries. We apologize for the error. It never should have happened."
Typos happen. But Trump—and the advisers and pundits around him—often over-simplifies immigration talk until what he's saying is practically nonsense. Take, for example, his claims that Mexico "is sending" criminals across the border, or that other countries aren't doing enough to keep migrants from heading to the U.S. He seems to operate on the idea that heads of state sit down with a stack of census data to decide who they want to keep and who goes, and they get rid of them by, somehow, convincing them to walk thousands of miles to the U.S. border where they apply for asylum. And Fox & Friends has breathlessly backed up Trump on his anti-immigrant tirades, mentioning caravans daily in the week before the last State of the Union and, in Hegseth's case, comparing one migrant caravan to an "invasion."
Meanwhile, Trump is also threatening to shut down the U.S. border with actual Mexico, a move that will affect nearly 5 million American jobs. Like his moves to block foreign aid, this policy doesn't make any more sense the more it gets explained.
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via GQ
http://bit.ly/2WrfIpH April 1, 2019 at 12:20PM BruceDayne, Luke Darby April 1, 2019 at 12:44PM
