The US tried to stop cartel money-laundering; devastated mom-and-pop businesses

We have similar problems in the UK. Lots of extra paperwork for small businesses and individuals, very little impact on big crime that was supposed to be the target. Just opening a bank account can be a pain, and more so if you are living abroad (whether a citizen or not).

He's also making it difficult/impossible for people without work visas to obtain auto loans which is destroying the used car market in latino communities and cities with large latino populations. Executive Order 14406 defends this with,

> Low-dollar cross-border funds transfers have been used to facilitate or commit terrorist financing, narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, and other illegal activity.

They're banging the national security drum to make it unlivable here for some.

I'd say the law has achieve exactly the effect it intended.

> a violation of the fourth amendment that protects the rights of people against unreasonable searches and seizures

So there exist juridical interpretations that call monitoring low value money transfer «unreasonable searches and seizures»? This is immensely interesting. Does anyone have further info?

@dang is there a mechanism to indicate that I think a post itself is okay, but that the entire comments section attached to it should be nuked from orbit? Are we supposed to flag the post in this case?

My question is , why don't these people have bank accounts?

It surprises me how much Americans don't understand how deeply the cartel is in every transaction. Yes, sending money to Grandma to pay for a car is funding the cartel who probably got paid to make the car available. Grandma may even pay small direct bribes to the cartel just to be able to live her life.

Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution) or we can make Mexico a safe and excellent country again, and that means getting rid of the cartel.

And yes, other countries have their issues too and we should help stabilize those countries as well.

If the Mexican government can fix their cartel issue, we can go back to normal remittances. Until then the US will make policy choices to resolve problems.

As always, the salt of the earth people will pay the cost for politicians being bad at things.

If this were true there wouldn't be any "mom-and-pop businesses" left. But they're still present and making money.

So I call this "horse puckey"!

I wonder how much this will drive adoption of crypto for remittances.

This article is repeating a transparently false framing as the truth. This wasn't a law about cartel money laundering, which doesn't happen near the border anyway. Money laundering at scale happens in the global market and always has.

The clear purpose of the regulation was exactly the "side effect" detailed in the article: hurting immigrant communities that maintain ties across the border. And it worked. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.

Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission. It is a fundamental purpose of money. To deny this purpose puts the validity of particular money into question. Putting up fences results in a very high rate of false positives. No wonder people use crypto as they should.

If you want to go after cartels, then actually go after cartels. That's not what they're doing.

Ah yes let’s ruin someone’s life over $200 but nobody look at Trumps accounts. He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.

The amount of nickel-and-diming and outright being screwed over at local businesses I've experienced in my lifetime vastly eclipses generous return policies and treatment by megacorporations.

I forget where I read this but I agree that if you want to know the real reason for a government policy, look at the effect is has.

It's pretty obvious what they're doing.