A remarkable incident took place today on Saturday April 2. Thumbing their noses at Donald Trump, two Mexican immigrants sneaked to the very top of a Trump International Hotel and Tower, placing on top of the building a Mexican flag.
The incident embodies several important issues regarding the bizarre race for the White House being carried out inside the Republican Party. The most important of them all is the fact that the Trump building so defiled by the two Mexican construction workers does not stand on US soil, it stands in a foreign country, in neighboring Canada. We are talking about the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver, Canada.
The second issue is that the Mexican construction workers who go by the names of Diego Saúl Reyna and Alfonso Ramos are not illegal immigrants in Canada, they are bona fide naturalized Canadian citizens. And why go to Canada instead of going to the USA? Because Canada, unlike the USA, welcomes Mexican workers. Canada does not hate Mexican immigrants, quite the contrary, displaying an attitude befitting the true spirit of the words placed at the Statue of Liberty, Canada loves Mexican workers and considers their contributions to Canada’s prosperity and wealth as a good reason to welcome them. Remember the guest worker program that has been stuck in the US Congress for decades? For several years, Canada has had a Canadian guest worker program for Mexican workers. The Canadian guest worker program is a spit in the eye of hypocritical US Congressmen and politicians who proclaim their interest in promoting good relations with the closest neighbors of the USA while at the same time adopting a Trump-like mentality towards Mexicans. This is sheer hypocrisy at its best, which oddly enough is supported by many Americans.
The third important issue is that whereas Donald Trump is proclaiming himself as the man who will protect and promote American jobs to “make America great again”, he is doing quite the opposite, and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver is the best example of his lies. To erect that building, he could very well have had a 100 percent American work force, hiring American construction workers in the USA and relocating them to Vancouver in order to get his Trump Tower built. But alas, the American worker was shoved aside by Mister Trump himself, who chose to build his tower in Vancouver using Canadian workers instead. And many of those construction workers who got his Trump Tower built in Canada where Mexican immigrants! Indeed, even in the USA many of those who build the Trump Hotels and Towers are undocumented immigrants, and Donald Trump knows it! Indeed, he knows it damn well. He usually employs foreign workers alongside his American workers, and this is a well known fact.
Canada is no unknown territory for the Trumps. Trump’s grandpa Frederick established a house of ill-repute in the province of British Columbia known as the Artic Hotel (a brothel in disguise used by floozies and pimps in a scenario which is not that much different to the Trump Hotels now used by executive escort girls and their Madams with the difference being in the category and the price) and thus the origins of the family fortune are rooted in prostitution and gambling, real estate would come much later. It is not widely known that grandpa Trump left Germany as a draft-dodger, and with Canada being the paradise of American draft-dodgers who fled there during the Vietnam war era it it no wonder that the Trumps, none of whom have served Uncle Sam in the battlefield (including the Donald himself) have always viewed Canada with great sympathy. Avoiding military service in Germany was the reason of why grandpa Trump later in life lied about his German origins claiming he was a Swede when in fact he originated in Kallstadt. By example and inheritance, lies lie at the very core of the Trumps who may very well end up in Hell due to their disdain towards the Ninth Commandment (Thou Shall Not Lie) among other things.
Donald Trump, as well as many Americans, would love to see Canada break up and ask to join the USA, for as we have seen above the ties between the Trumps and Canada go far back in time.
But what about a fenced United States with a Trump wall at its borders?
By now it is clear that Donald Trump plans to go ahead as President of the USA with his intentions of building a Berlin-like wall to separate forever the USA from Mexico, in line with his deep seated hatred of Mexico and Mexicans.
But some may wonder what has kept him so far from making a similar proposal regarding the border between the USA and Canada.
Indeed, why?
Donald Trump has taken a ferocious stance against Mexico accusing Mexico of taking manufacturing jobs away from Americans, and in his crusade against Mexico he has taken credit for supposedly convincing Ford Motor Co. not to build manufacturing plants in Mexico. The claim, just as many others made by Trump the Great American Liar (Satan reserves for himself the title Prince of Liars), turns out to be false, but Trump’s followers couldn’t care any less about the veracity or falsity of his claims.
But there yet is another fact that Donald Trump has deliberately left out of his crazy tirades. Up until last year, the biggest exporter of cars to the USA was not Mexico, but Canada. Mexico only surpassed Canada in auto production for the very first time in 2015. And it did not surpass Canada by much, since Mexico exported 1,993,162 units while Canada exported 1,972,370 units, a difference of barely 20,792 units, as can be seen in the following graph (source: El Diario, a Mexican newspaper, the red line indicates cars manufactured in Canada and exported to the USA, and the dark green line indicates cars manufactured in Mexico and exported to the USA):
Even though cars manufactured in Canada and exported to the USA create jobs in Canada and not in the USA, Donald Trump has never even mentioned any intention of creating any special import tariff applied to cars manufactured in Canada and exported to the USA even when the Canadian built cars have been surpassing in volume the number of Mexican cars built and exported to the USA. Indeed, why? But there is an even higher issue at stake: why has Donald Trump carefully avoided ever mentioning building a wall between the USA and Canada?
But wait! It gets even better. The Trump Tower built in Vancouver is not the only Trump property built outside the USA. He has built real estate properties offshore all around the world in regions such as Europe (e.g. the Trump Hotel Ireland at Doonbeg) and Latin America (e.g. the one in Rio de Janeiro) and Asia (e.g. his luxury hotel in Bali), thus creating a lot of construction jobs not inside the USA but outside the USA. Had he built all those mammoth buildings in American cities, he would have created a lot of jobs in America for American citizens. So why has he gone offshore to build his hotels? For exactly the same reason Trump-vilified US companies like Ford and Carrier have invested in building manufacturing plants offshore and overseas. It’s all a matter of profit, and Trump is a businessman just like them, that’s why he is filthy rich. Yet he blasts and trounces others demonizing them for doing exactly the thing he does best, all the way expecting that the wide audiences he garners around him at his rallies will never take notice of this fundamental contradiction, with his fans naively expecting and believing he will keep his promise of creating a lot of jobs in the USA if elected president. Ha! Just wait and see. Does Trump really believes his followers are that dumb? Yes, he does! And he may be right.
All of the above has to do do with a very thorny issue buried very deep in the American psyche but which few Americans if any will admit to: the territorial annexation of Canada. It is nothing less than the continuation of the spirit of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny never really died, nor did it fade away. It was just shoved aside in the wake of changing geopolitical scenarios brought about by the XX century.
The annexation of Canada, with all of its abundant natural resources, would have been the crown jewel of Manifest Destiny. It seemed almost unavoidable. It would have almost doubled the territorial extension of the USA, turning the USA into a territorial behemoth. But then…
After taking away from Mexico more than half of its territory by military means, the US government was poised to carry out the conquest of Canada resorting to some claim or excuse just as it did in its US-government enticed independence of Texas. It was ready and more than willing to do so, except that a major unanticipated event got in the way: the Civil War. Had it not been for the American Civil War, it is very likely that Canada would not exist today as an independent nation, it would have been absorbed by the USA a long time ago. But the Civil War left the USA in such a bad shape, militarily speaking, that it was in no condition to put up a fight against the British Empire which almost certainly would have intervened in the defense of Canada. Besides, there was a lot of unrest in the Southern states which were unhappy after the defeat of the Confederate Army, and if the Union had embarked in an annexation war of Canada and thus in a war with Great Britain, the Southern states would have gone for a second secession regrouping and mustering soldiers and resources. Furthermore, with the Union engaged in two wars, one up North with Canada and England, and one down South with the states that used to form the Confederacy, there was the possibility that Mexico could have joined forces with the Confederacy in order to reclaim by military means the territory it had lost with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. To put it briefly (and bluntly), any attempt made by the US government to annex Canada by military means after the Civil War would most likely have ended in a military catastrophe resulting in the dismantling of the USA itself. There was no other choice than to shove aside the Manifest Destiny plans for the annexation of Canada.
The most that could be done in the Northern side was to add Alaska to the US mainland by an outright purchase (yes, at that time the Russian government was dumb enough to give up Alaska for a few dollars, and perhaps it would have sold more of its territorial assets in Eastern Europe to the USA if the dumb Czarist government had not been overthrown by an angry citizenry).
The turn of the century brought World War I with major threats looming on the horizon such as the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe and the rise of fascism in response to the threats posed by Communism. Under such scenarios, the conditions to try to attempt the annexation of Canada by military means evaporated for good. At this point, with Manifest Destiny still in the back burner, the hopes for the territorial annexation of Canada hinged not on the use of military means (i.e. an outright invasion) but in trying to convince Canadians to follow the same route used in Texas, with each province of Canada (Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario) abandoning Canada with the proclamation of self-independence, and thereafter asking to join the United States of America. Some US politicians were actually hoping that the independence movement of Quebec would lead to a split of Canada as a nation further prompting the remaining provinces of Canada to follow the path of Texas by eventually joining the USA. There are still some in Washington to have high hopes on this happening although they will not admit it.
The US government has been doing its part and is still doing its part in trying to entice Canada to voluntarily become a territorial possession of the USA. This is more than obvious in the asymmetrical treatment it gives to Canadians who live near the US border as opposed to the treatment given to Mexicans who live near the US border. Just for shopping and visiting purposes and nothing else the US government requires all Mexican citizens who live at the border to obtain from a US Consulate something known as a Border Crossing Card (also called a laser visa). These documents are not cheap, the Mexicans who apply for them must pay for them and if after the Consular interview the laser visa is denied not a single cent is returned to any of the applicants. The laser visas contain a lot of biometric data of each Mexican applicant as if each candidate was applying for a security clearance inside the FBI or the US military, and year after year the requirements have grown more and more stringent, and keep in mind that the document does not allow its owner to apply for any job inside the USA. The application process which is highly bureaucratic requires a lot of documentation that must be procured and provided by each applicant to the US State Department, and each applicant is checked to see for any felonies or misdemeanor the applicant may have committed in the USA or Mexico. Eventually it may come to a point were applicants for a Border Crossing Card may be required to pass medical examinations with blood and urine tests and even X-rays thrown in for good measure. In contrast, Canadians can enter into the USA just by showing their Canadians driver’s license or some other suitable form of identification used in Canada. No Border Crossing Card, no nothing, this in spite that all of the Islamic terrorist who have entered the USA through the border have done it through Canada and to date no Islamic terrorist (not a single one!) has been detained while trying to enter the USA through the border with Mexico. What would happen if the US government, in fairness and equity and equal treatment of both its neighbors, demanded all Canadians to obtain a US Border Crossing Card for authorized entry into the USA? Canadians would be fuming denouncing this as an act of outright hostility against Canadian citizens, and it would convince every single Canadian of giving up forever and permanently on the idea of Canada joining the USA. Which is NOT what the US government wants. Solution? Treat Canadians as good neighbors, as true friends, no Border Crossing Card requirement for them. And as for the Mexicans, well, that’s something else. Donald Trump is only raising the hatred towards US neighbors to the South to a new level, but an implied hostility has always been there against Mexico, although at times it is not evident, at least not in the official diplomatic lingo.
And this is the current state of affairs.
Let’s go back now to Trump and his walls.
If Donald Trump were to propose the building of a wall between Canada and the USA using some Trumpted-up argument, he would most certainly make the Canadians very angry just as he has made the Mexicans very angry. But not only would he make the Canadians very angry. The Canadians would unite against any idea of joining the USA, Canada would be firmly united as never before and even french-speaking Quebec would stand firmly in the alliance, and thus any possibility of having Canada join the USA without resorting to some kind of military means would be dead not just for the time being but dead for good. It would be the epitaph of Manifest Destiny and, for that matter, the death of the Monroe doctrine. And the truth of the matter is that many Americans are simply not willing to give up on the idea of Canada joining the USA, either as a whole or in a piecemeal fashion. If anyone stands in the way of that possibility (and this includes Donald Trump himself), his political ambitions will most likely end up buried in the ballot boxes. As a master psychologist and manipulator of the masses, Donald Trump is keenly aware of this. Thus, there will be no wall built between Canada and the USA. Nor will we hear this possibility ever being mentioned on Trump’s campaign headquarters.
The only thing that remains firmly in the Trump doctrines is the building of a gigantic Babel-like wall between the USA and Mexico. After all, the USA has already taken from Mexico all the territory it ever wanted with the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty. The only thing left to do is to take the entire Gulf of Mexico, rename it as “Gulf of the USA”, and claim all of its resources all the way down to the Yucatan peninsula as property of the US government. But would Trump really be brazen enough to do such a thing? With all the things he has said in the past and which have been applauded by his followers, and his hatred of all Mexicans, it is certainly something worth considering. Nevertheless, if Trump gets to be elected president, perhaps Canadians should begin to worry, especially considering that many Americans would love to see a map just like the one depicted at the beginning of this document, with Canada gone and each Canadian province turned into one more star of the Union, with all of the former provinces of Canada governed by a US president such as Donald Trump.
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