La Jornada: Trump’s tariffs are here to stay, warns Greer

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer warned Mexico’s auto and steel industries that they should not expect the renegotiation of the North American trade agreement (USMCA) to eliminate tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on their sectors, four industry sources familiar with the talks said.

Greer made this statement on Monday before industrialists and business leaders in meetings held in Mexico City to discuss the goals of the T-MEC reform with President Claudia Sheinbaum and the Secretary of the Economy, Marcelo Ebrard, as the July 1 deadline for the six-year review approaches.

“Tariffs are here to stay. President Trump likes them. We will never return to a world without tariffs,” said the US official, according to one of four sources who attended one of the meetings and, like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity.

This is the first time Greer has publicly stated that Mexico will have to live with at least some level of tariffs following the USMCA modifications that will be negotiated this year.

Mexico and Canada have seen the USMCA negotiations as a way to alleviate the high tariffs that Trump imposed last year that have caused difficulties for automakers and other industries in a highly integrated North American economy.

Greer met with the United States Chamber of Commerce in Mexico, the Business Coordinating Council, the Mexican Association of the Automotive Industry (AMIA) and the National Chamber of the Iron and Steel Industry, among other groups in the country.

Mexico’s automotive and steel industries depend largely on the United States, with more than 50 percent of its exports going to that country.

Under the USMCA and its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement, there were more than three decades of tariff-free trade in automobiles and auto parts between Mexico, the United States and Canada, until Trump last year imposed a 25 percent tariff on vehicle imports for “national security” under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

Since then, Trump has negotiated tariffs of 15 percent on auto imports from Japan, the European Union and South Korea, and 10 percent on those from Britain, making it cheaper to ship some cars from those countries to the United States than from Mexico.

One of the sources also said that US negotiators proposed, at a meeting last week between both sides in Washington, to modify the rules of origin to require that 100 percent of key components, such as engines, main electronic parts and software come from North America, in order to avoid tariffs; it is currently required to be 75 percent of the content.

For its part, the Mexican steel industry faces a US tariff of 50 percent on basic steel and aluminum products and a 25 percent tariff on derived products that contain at least 15 percent of these metals by weight.

The Mexican automotive industry depends largely on the United States. American buyers purchased 2.8 million of the 4 million vehicles produced in Mexico in 2024, according to the AMIA. But after three decades of growth, vehicle exports to the United States fell almost 3 percent in 2025.

Mexico lost about 60,000 jobs in the automobile industry last year, according to government data.