The US has asked Mexico to mirror Washington’s tariff wall against Chinese steel and aluminum by imposing Section 232-style duties on imports from outside North America, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter. The goal is to preserve preferential treatment for steel produced in the US, Mexico and Canada, while applying a common external barrier to China. YourDailyAnalysis isolates the stated goal as the clearest way to understand this ask: Washington isn’t primarily trying to raise Mexican tariffs for their own sake, it’s trying to close what US officials see as a backdoor through which Chinese steel could enter North American supply chains via Mexico.
Mexico’s own initial position on this request is notably accommodating rather than resistant, which shapes how likely this proposal is to actually happen. While it represents a big ask from US trade officials, Mexico is open to pursuing it amid talks for a broader deal under the USMCA trade agreement review, the people said, speaking anonymously because the talks are private. YourDailyAnalysis weighs that early openness more heavily than the size of the ask itself, since a Mexican government resistant to the idea in principle would typically signal disagreement even in background conversations rather than openness to pursuing it.
Mexico has already taken a concrete step in this direction that predates the current request, which gives Washington’s ask real momentum to build on. Mexico offered earlier this year to sharply reduce purchases of Chinese steel, one of the people said, and earlier this year implemented new tariffs on roughly 1,500 products from countries it does not have trade deals with, a move that mostly affects imports from China. YourDailyAnalysis counts that 1,500-product tariff action as evidence Mexico was already independently aligning its trade posture with Washington’s before this specific Section 232 request arrived, which suggests the current ask is more an extension of an existing direction than a genuinely new demand.
The current asymmetry between the two countries’ tariff regimes is specific and substantial, and it explains why Washington considers Mexico’s existing measures insufficient. The US has set a Section 232 tariff of 50% on core steel and aluminum from China and most other economies and charges 25% on derivatives products, while Mexico taxes metals on a product-by-product basis, with imports from countries it lacks trade deals with subject to rates of as much as 25% plus certain anti-dumping duties. That gap, a 50% US baseline against a 25% Mexican ceiling, is the exact mismatch Washington’s mirroring request is designed to close.
American steel producers are pushing for measures that go considerably further than simple rate-matching, which shows the industry’s ambitions for this negotiation extend beyond what’s currently being discussed at the government level. Producers have asked the administration to call on Mexico and Canada to adopt equivalent Section 232 measures and requested a “melted and poured” rule requiring steel to be made at the furnace stage in North America, not merely rolled or finished there, alongside raising the North American steel-purchase requirement for automakers to 85% from 70%. Your Daily Analysis draws a distinction between what US negotiators are formally asking Mexico for and what domestic industry actually wants, since the melted-and-poured rule and the 85% automaker threshold go meaningfully beyond simply matching tariff percentages.
Watch the September meeting in Washington between US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Mexican officials, since the two sides have already held a third bilateral round in Mexico City covering steel, aluminum, autos and other issues, and the US aims to close a framework agreement with Mexico by year-end. The precise rates and product coverage still under discussion, according to the people familiar with the talks, is the detail most likely to determine whether Mexico’s accommodating early posture survives contact with the specifics of what full Section 232 mirroring would actually require.
