Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón wants U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to spend a little more time thinking about the logical consequences of relentlessly bashing the country he used to lead.
Trying to eliminate jobs in Mexico will likely spur more immigration, Calderón said Friday in a tweet directed at Trump.
Calderón has a point. The peak era of mass migration from Mexico occurred from the 1980s to the early 2000s, at a time when the country was experiencing the combined effects of a baby boom and economic stagnation.
But the birth rate in Mexico has slowed and the national economy has improved in recent years. The number of unauthorized Mexicans living in the United States has remained flat since the 2008 recession ― and more Mexicans left the United States between 2009 and 2014 than immigrated here, according to the Pew Research Center.
Still, Trump has used his Twitter account in recent weeks to reaffirm his crusade against companies that make cars in Mexico, publicly (and often inaccurately) calling out automakers Ford, General Motors and Toyota for their operations in the country. Toyota is a Japanese multinational corporation.
Under Obama, however, the U.S. auto industry has created jobs at a more rapid pace than the other major sectors of the economy tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to Yahoo News.
Trump said on Friday morning that he would force Mexico to reimburse U.S. taxpayers, who he expects to pay for his proposed border wall expansion. He said construction should begin before reaching an agreement with Mexico, “for the sake of speed.”
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has repeatedly said his country won’t pay for Trump’s border wall expansion.
Another former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, also weighed in on Friday afternoon and said his country would not pay for a wall.
This article has been updated with Vicente Fox’s tweet.
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