Mexico’s leaders may still seek to negotiate with the Trump administration to prevent the Mexican economy from faltering, McCormick says.

“The consequences of pushing the Mexican economy into a forced and deep recession is that, if anything, it will actually make people have to resort to informal economic activity, which oftentimes is illicit,” she says.

In the Business Insider article, “Trump's tariff turnarounds are key to his strategy — but it may not pay off in the long term,” McCormick says that Trump is playing a game of brinkmanship, or pushing a risky situation to the brink of disaster before backing down in the hopes of a positive outcome, which has been an “intrinsic part of the Trump playbook.”

“If and when Trump does follow through with tariffs, it's not going to be this sort of wholesale 25% on everything. Rather, they will ultimately end up taking a selective approach to certain industries or certain sectors,” says McCormick. “For example, I think that manufacturing, and then especially the automobile industry, would be so severely hard hit on both sides of the border that that's going to be off the table.”