Arizona lawmakers, business officials and experts blasted President Donald Trump’s threat to impose a tariff on Mexican goods in hopes of cutting immigration, calling his plan everything from “terribly damaging” to “unhinged.”
Trump announced the tariffs on May 30 – one day after Border Patrol agents apprehended a group of 1,036 immigrants crossing the border near El Paso, Texas – to pressure Mexico to “dramatically reduce or eliminate the number of illegal aliens crossing its territory into the United States.”
But critics said the move would do little to slow the influx of immigrants while doing a lot to harm U.S. businesses and consumers.
“Tariffs are not the way to handle the problems with immigration that we are seeing at the border,” said George Hammond, director of the Economic and Business Research Center at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management.
For more, read the full story from the Phoenix Business Journal.
