WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has said that 25% border taxes on imports from Canada and Mexico are coming on 1 February.
Trump speaking to reporters at the Oval Office added that a decision about whether to impose tariffs on oil imports from these countries had yet to be made.
He added the move was aimed to address the large amounts of undocumented migrants and the fentanyl that come across US borders as well as trade deficits with its neighbours.
The president also suggested that he was still planning to impose new tariffs on China, which he said earlier this month would be 10%, but did not give any details, BBC reported.
“With China, I’m also thinking about something because they’re sending fentanyl into our country, and because of that, they’re causing us hundreds of thousands of deaths,” Trump said.
“So China is going to end up paying a tariff also for that, and we’re in the process of doing that.”
During the election campaign, Trump threatened to target Chinese-made products with high tariffs but did not take any immediate action on his first day at the White House.
Since 2018, U.S. imports from China have declined, a trend economists partly attribute to the escalating tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term.
Earlier this month, Ding Xuexiang, Vice Premier of China, addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said his country was looking for a “win-win” solution to ease trade tensions and wanted to expand its imports.
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Canada and Mexico have said that they would respond to US tariffs with their own measures. High taxes on oil imports from Canada and Mexico could undermine Trump’s pledge to reduce the cost of living.
Approximately 40% of the crude processed in U.S. refineries is imported, with Canada supplying the bulk of it.
Mexico and Canada are the United States’ largest trading partners. In 2020, during his first term, Trump replaced the long-standing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was promoted as a more favourable deal for American businesses, according to CNBC.
