By PAUL BEDARD • 9/22/16 2:04 PM

Bolstering Donald Trump's pledge to build a wall and deport criminal illegals, a former Mexican foreign secretary said that there are "many ways" the Republican presidential candidate, if elected, can get Mexico to pay for the wall and deport four million immigrants.

"The wall is a perfectly feasible promise to fulfill," said Jorge Castañeda, Mexico's secretary of foreign affairs from 2000 to 2003.



Dismissing a Mexican Senate move to block federal payments to a Trump administration for the wall as "silly," Castañeda offered up several ways for Trump to find the money.

"If he really wants Mexicans to pay for the wall, he has many ways of getting many Mexicans to pay for the wall, increasing the fee for visas...increasing the toll on the bridges..taxing remittances," he said at the Hudson Institute in Washington.

What's more, he said that the wall is an extension of programs first put into place by former President Bill Clinton and extended under former President George W. Bush and President Obama.

"Actually today you have somewhere like 40 percent of the 1,700 mile wall that is already there. So why can't Trump do what he has promised to do if his three predecessors did a lot of it without wanting to?" he said.

Ditto on deportations. Noting that Obama has been dubbed the "Deporter-in-Chief" for removing two million, Castañeda said doubling that to four million shouldn't be a problem.

"He certainly could deport twice as many as Obama, why not, why not? Everybody knows where they it's very easy to find them. It's expensive, but it's not outrageously expensive and you could pressure a bunch of people including my country into paying for part of it and taking them back," said the diplomat who is a New York University professor.

"If Obama was able to deport a little more than two million...why can't Trump deport four million if he wants to?" he added.

His comments were first reported by the Weekly Standard's Ethan Epstein.

Castañeda did not hold back in criticizing Trump, saying his "election will be a huge disaster for Mexico."

But he wasn't so high on Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, even using a crude joke to explain that he feels she doesn't like his country.

From the Ethan Epstein's Weekly Standard story:

"The problem with Hillary Clinton on Latin America is I have the feeling—and it's pure feeling, I've only been with her a couple of times, I don't know her well . . . but I know a lot of people who do know her—she doesn't really like the place," he at the Hudson Institute in downtown D.C., "And I know she doesn't really like Mexico."

"I don't know if something happened in the Honeymoon in Acapulco or whatever—or didn't happen," he said, to laughter. "I don't know. Hard to say. But there's something there that . . . she's just not comfortable with . . . She had a very good time once in Cartagena at one of the summits or something, that she liked but that was about the only time she seems to have enjoyed one of the many, many, many trips she made as secretary of state, and as first lady before, and as senator also [to Latin America]. And particularly Mexico."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ex...rticle/2602588