Here's how Trump's wall plan could expand the black market


Donald Trump's precise plan to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it involves confiscating remittance payments that Mexicans living in America send home to their families, he revealed on Tuesday. It's a plan that in practice would expand the black market for money transfers and even increase crime:
Security and money-laundering experts who watch the underground financial economy say that in all likelihood, such a rule would not stop the remittances: It would simply send them into the underground economy. Couriers or others will help facilitate money transfers across the border; Mexican nationals could also transfer money through a digital currency like Bitcoin."I guarantee you, before the wall has five bricks in it," said [Don Semesky, a former financial investigator at the IRS and DEA], "there would be an informal black market."Either way, the result would be devastating for law enforcement: they’d lose a powerful tool to trace dubious money tied to drug-runners, terrorists, or human traffickers. [Politico]
Trump's idea would also have a decimating effect on money transfer businesses like Western Union. "He would probably kill the industry," Semesky said.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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