(Daily Signal)—I’d like to talk today about the status of Mexican-American, not as a Mexican-American citizen, but Mexico’s relationship with the United States. What is the Mexican-American status quo now? It’s very disturbing.
I’ll just give you an example of what I mean: We sent deported criminals back to Mexico and they forbid—we were going to, and they would not allow them to land in Mexico. We had people of the cartel shoot an American citizen on U.S. land and shoot at our Border Patrol. So, what is Mexico? Is it neutral? Is it an ally? Is it an enemy? Is it a frenemy?
Here’s some data. Right now, we have a trade deficit with Mexico of $150 billion. Remember Ross Perot? I was about in my 40s, early 40s, in 1992-96, third-party candidate. He said, “You’re going to hear a big sucking sound.” What he meant was your jobs are going to go to Mexico. They’re going to run up surpluses.
We’re going to get hurt. I thought that was, kind of, a little bit dramatic. That’s exactly what happened. When he warned that, as soon as NAFTA went in, they had a $2 [billion] to $3 billion and then $10 [billion] and then $40 [billion] and then $60 [billion]. The deficit with Mexico will be about $168 billion per year now. It was in 2024, it’ll be bigger. $167 billion. They—that does not include, that does not include the $63 billion that Mexican expatriates—the vast majority here illegally—send back to Mexico.
And it’s worse than that. How does somebody who’s impoverished, from some of the poorest areas of Mexico, free up $400 or $500, $600 of their income to send back to the Mexican government—I don’t say Mexican government directly, but relieving the Mexican government or their responsibilities to have a social network for their own family, for people’s family. And the answer is they’re on subsidies, local, state, federal, housing, education, food, health care, provided by the American taxpayer.
And, a third thing that’s very worrisome—we should all be worrisome—on average, 75,000 Americans die of fentanyl overdoses per year. And it’s been going on for several years, at least a decade. But here’s the problem, it’s not as [former president of Mexico] Mr. [Andres] Obrador says, “Our fault”; partly an addict, he has to take responsibility.
But the cartels take raw products to make fentanyl, shipped in deliberately by China who wants us to suffer, and then repackages it in special cartel industries and then disguises it for export into the United States. Sometimes by lacing it into fake pharmaceuticals that are prescription drugs and sometimes putting it into opiates, so that the user may get a high but won’t be killed, but may be killed because they’re inexact or they’re deliberate, who knows?
And if you total that up over a decade, that’s 750,000 deaths. That’s more than all of the wars of the 20th century and the 21st century—World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan—all the people who died by our enemies. The Mexican government or the cartels—and I say Mexican government by enabling the cartels—have killed Americans.
It’s worse than that. In addition to that, the Mexican government votes against the United States on almost every major referendum at the United Nations, especially anything to deal with the Middle East. So, this is my point. They are deliberately exporting their poor, and now we had 12 million people come in. And their way of thinking, this is wonderful.
We have a safety valve. So, if we have internal dissension because we’ve exploited indigenous people, we send them to the United States. No. 2, they send back $63 billion. It’s our second-largest source of foreign exchange—more than tourism and oil—right next to the trade surplus we get with the United States.
And then the cartels, we don’t know how much they make, but that money is fungible. So, between this trade surplus of $167 billion, plus the $63 billion and remittances, plus whatever the cartels make—$20 [billion] to $30 billion from their opiate sales in the United States—we’re getting over $200 billion off of this asymmetrical relationship. And we pay the United States back by saying, “If you dare deport people who have committed a felony or a crime, we’re going to block your arrival.”
So, I don’t know what Mexico is, but I know what we can do about it. Twenty percent tax on anybody who sends, anywhere in the United States, money back to Mexico. That would raise about $12 billion. That would send a message. And then we have a tariff. Donald Trump says he’s going to do it very quickly and that would tell Mexico, you’re not going to run up a $167 billion under the guise of the North American Free Trade [Agreement]. Not going to happen. And then we’re going to tell them, if you don’t deal with the cartels we will. And I think Mexico will come to attention.
And we will not have Ms. [Claudia] Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, saying what Mr. Obrador did, during the Biden administration. It’s a beautiful thing that 40 million people have come to the United States illegally. Oh, by the way, I suggest all you people who can vote in the United States, vote against Republican. And he did that again, and again, and again.
It’s time for us to be very sober, careful, judicious and say to Mexico, “You have to decide whether you’re a friend, an ally, or an enemy. Because right now, you are an enemy of the United States. And we will take the necessary adjustments—make the necessary adjustments for that unfortunate fact.”
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
