The memo is relatively simple. What Trump wants to do is to demand a one-time payment of $5 to $10 billion from Mexico. If the Mexicans refuse to pay, he will use a provision of the USA Patriot Act to ban remittances to Mexico from the United States. Since such a ban would cut off up to $25 billion that Mexico gets from its nationals living abroad. That would be a disaster for an already shaky Mexican economy. If that doesn’t work, a President Trump would then implement higher fees for visas and border crossing cards as well as put into motion the high tariffs he has previously discussed that would start a trade war.

What’s wrong with that? Plenty.

First, using an anti-terrorism law in this fashion to stop wire transfers is legally dubious. It involves treating illegal immigration as an emergency threat to public safety that is more reminiscent of the tricks employed by the power-mad president of the “House of Cards” Netflix television show than anything else. Such a plan would be litigated and might be overturned.

But even if we assume that Trump could get away with it, using laws in this fashion without benefit of legislation or normal procedure also ought to remind Republicans of the way President Obama has used his power to issue executive orders to run roughshod over the Constitution and the rule of law on the same issue.

More than that, implementing regulations of this kind about money orders or Western Union transfers would be an administrative nightmare and would involve imposing onerous federal regulations on small business owners. It would also require a massive expansion of the federal bureaucracy to enforce these kinds of regulations. It’s hard to say what the cost of doing this might be but it would be astronomical. Yet even if Trump followed through on it, it’s also something that would likely be evaded, as immigrants found alternate, less easily detected ways of sending money home. He could make it very hard on immigrants, both legal and illegal to help their relatives but the assumption that the federal government has the resources or the power to confiscate or block all these remittances is unfounded.

Of course, the cutoff of the remittances makes no sense if Trump is really going to deport all 12 million illegal immigrants. Once he does that magic trick — which, if actually accomplished, would also require a large army of additional federal employees — there will be no point to the ban.

Let’s also note that even if we thought this was possible, the expense and the vast expansion of federal power and bureaucracy needed in order to pull of this trick is exactly the sort of thing Republicans and conservatives hate. If the Tea Party revolted against George W. Bush’s big government style of conservatism why should they support another version of the same thing from Trump, a man far less committed to Constitutional principles than the 43rd president?

Then there are the tariffs and the trade war with Mexico to consider. While Trump speaks as if raising such barriers to trade will hurt Mexico, the price of these measures will be primarily paid for by American consumers in the form of higher prices and by American workers whose jobs in industries that export products to Mexico will be affected. As with the remittances, there is no doubt that the U.S. could hurt Mexico badly in a trade war. But the damage wouldn’t be limited to south of the border. Not all Americans benefit from trade, but more do than ideological protectionists like Trump and Bernie Sanders appear to understand. There would be no winners in such a trade war, only losers.

But let’s leave aside for a moment the impractical nature of Trump’s schemes, their costs as well as the implications of concentrating even more power in the president than Obama has seized. Instead, give a moment’s thought to the basic assumption behind all these schemes: that Mexico can be intimidated, bribed or starved into surrendering on an issue of national pride as well as economics.

That will never happen. And no one who knows even a little bit about the history of that nation and its always-complicated relations with the United States could believe such a thing for a minute. Indeed, only someone who views the world solely through the prism of commerce rather than national interest could do so.

In this sense, Trump is very much like Bernie Sanders, whose bizarre rants about banks and socialism in his New York Daily News interview yesterday illustrated everything that is wrong with the left wing of the Democratic Party. Trump is a rogue capitalist while Sanders is a Marxist, but both believe money is the only thing that makes the world go round. But by thinking he can bring Mexicans to their knees and make them pay for a wall that is a metaphor for American fears of their southern neighbors, Trump demonstrates that he doesn’t know the first thing about their national character and the history that helped form it.

Mexico has a checkered history of self-governance, but the factor that defines their sense of nationhood is resistance against foreign exploitation and invasion. Their resentment of American land grabs of their territory, first in the Texas revolution and then in the U.S. war with Mexico (which U.S. Grant later called “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”) and then later interventions and invasions undertaken by the Wilson administration during the Mexican Revolution, solidified a sense of grievance against their overbearing northern neighbor.

Just as important to Mexican identity is the tale of resistance to the French invasion of the 1860s that began with a demand by European powers for the republic to pay its debts. Mexicans were willing to die heroically to defend their sovereignty — commemorated in their Cinco de Mayo national holiday on the date of a military victory over the forces of Napoleon III — then. It is nothing less than blind arrogance and contempt for their dignity as a people to think they would not risk their prosperity to do so now. Nor would Americans behave differently if the shoe were on the other foot.

Perhaps a President Trump (an unlikely but still theoretical possibility) could twist the law into a pretzel and implement the ban on money transfers and even initiate a trade war over the opposition of Congress. Perhaps he could also somehow get away with creating a vast new government bureaucracy that would somehow ensure that no one sends a money order or a check or cash in an envelope to Mexico.

Yet even if he could do all that, it’s doubtful that America would be a net winner in the exchange. The collapse of the Mexican economy would hurt the U.S. and set off a new, even greater surge of illegal immigrants over the border and either over or under any wall Trump might build.

No matter what you think of Trump and his racist dog whistles, no foreign national has a right to enter the U.S. illegally. Americans have a right to police their border and to decide who comes in and out. But insecurity about the border is not a sufficient justification for a new war on Mexico that could not be won. Nor can a policy that is based on contempt for Mexicans lead to a productive solution to a problem with a nation that is, despite Trump’s rhetoric, one that the overwhelming majority of Americans consider a friend. Trump may have fleshed out his slogans with this memo. But even in long form, it is just as dangerous and dumb as it is in its shorter version.