美国国家公共电台 NPR A Proposed New Tax, Mainly On Latinos, To Pay For Trump's Border Wall

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Let's follow up on one of President Trump 1's signature campaign proposals. When he was running, he said that if elected he would build a wall along the southern border of the United States and get Mexico to pay for it.

New legislation has been introduced in Congress not to do precisely 2 that, not to make Mexico pay but to make migrants pay. It's a proposal to tax remittances 4, money that migrants send back to their home countries. NPR's Jason Beaubien reports.

JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE 5: Remittances are hugely important for the developing world. For some countries, remittances are the leading source of foreign capital. In Haiti for instance, they represent 28 percent of the country's overall gross domestic product. For Mexico, remittances bring in more cash each year than Mexico's vast oil fields.

RAFAEL VILLALOBOS JR.: When I send remittances to Mexico, it's typically to my parents.

BEAUBIEN: Rafael Villalobos Jr., who lives in eastern Washington state, says he sends a few hundred dollars each month to Mexico. His father, who's in his late 60s, has a small farm in the Mexican state of Michoacan. The farm generates some income, but Villalobos says the money he sends gives his parents stability.

VILLALOBOS JR.: It keeps them afloat, and it keeps my mom healthy. She is a type 2 diabetic, and so she has routine supplies that she has to purchase to continuously check her blood sugar and her prescription 6 that she takes daily.

BEAUBIEN: A bill introduced in Congress by Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama called the Border Wall Funding Act of 2017 would put a 2 percent tax on the money Villalobos sends to his parents each month in Mexico. Another proposal in the Senate would place a 7 percent fine on remittances unless the senders can prove they're in the U.S. legally.

A tax of 2 or 7 percent might not sound like a lot, but Villalobos says he recently switched from using Moneygram to a remittance 3 app called Remitly because it can save him about $10 on a $400 transfer. And he says 10 bucks 7 goes a long way in Mexico.

VILLALOBOS JR.: That is essentially 8 another couple days' worth of food sometimes depending on, you know, what you're buying.

BEAUBIEN: Villalobos is one of millions of people in this country who send remittances each month. Proposals to tax remittances are often framed as a way to tax immigrants who are in the country illegally. Villalobos, however, was born in the U.S. and is an American citizen. In the 1970s, his parents came up from Mexico to do agricultural work. Of their four children, Rafael and two of his siblings 9 were born here. Villalobos says he grew up picking fruits and vegetables across much of the U.S.

VILLALOBOS JR.: When we were in Florida, it was tomatoes, melons, bell peppers, nothing with thorns. My dad despised the idea of going to pick limes and oranges.

BEAUBIEN: He finds the proposed remittance tax is offensive, particularly given that candidate Trump promised to lower taxes and cut government regulation.

VILLALOBOS JR.: I've already earned my money and paid taxes on it. And the whole thing with this administration is about not having to pay more taxes, but yet I have to pay an extra tax on money that I've already earned to give it to my parents just because they are coincidentally on the other side of the border.

BEAUBIEN: The 2 percent remittance tax being proposed by Congressman 10 Mike Rogers applies to money being sent to Latin America and the Caribbean but nowhere else. China, India and the Philippines, which all actually take in more remittances each year than Mexico, aren't hit with a tax.

Congressman Rogers' office didn't respond to repeated requests for an interview about the bill. But Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C. think tank that advocates for tighter border controls, says a remittance tax is long overdue 11.

MARK KRIKORIAN: There is a certain symmetry to having illegal immigrants underwrite part of the enforcement to prevent illegal immigration.

BEAUBIEN: And he says such a tax is an obvious place to look for new money for the border wall.

KRIKORIAN: Because the people who would be paying it are people who don't vote. I mean, they're not even citizens.

BEAUBIEN: It's fairly unusual for governments to tax outflows of cash. And these proposals do not apply to businesses moving money abroad. Itai Grinberg, an international tax lawyer at Georgetown Law school, says taxing outflows of cash is something that's usually done by leftist autocrats 12 like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez when the value of their local currency goes into a nosedive. A tax on cross-border payments, he says, is not something you'd normally see from a country like the U.S.

ITAI GRINBERG: From the perspective of a major developed economy, it would be very unusual.

BEAUBIEN: Several Gulf 13 countries that rely heavily on migrant labor 14, however, have recently proposed remittance taxes, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The World Bank has blasted the idea of these taxes, saying they hurt some of the poorest countries on the globe.

In addition, a World Bank report on the subject last month says remittance taxes are difficult to administer. And even if they are put in place, migrants are likely to find some other way to get their money home. Jason Beaubien, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF JON HOPKINS' "LOST IN THOUGHT")