Post-Trump slump
Fewer foreign visitors heading to the United States
Commencing with the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, tourism officials of several U.S. cities have drawn attention, with alarm, to a reduction in the number of foreign residents visiting their cities.
One New York official cited an alarming drop of 700,000 foreign tourists no longer coming to the Big Apple.
But until now, no such figures have been reported for the United States as a whole. And administration officials have been careful not to name the actual numbers of fewer incoming tourists from abroad.
Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is staffed by non-political civil servants, has now supplied a statistic that is almost as alarming. According to the agency’s report, which was issued in the opening weeks of January, a drop of 3.3 per cent in the spending by incoming foreign tourists was experienced in 2017, resulting in a loss to the nation of $4.6 billion in revenue and 40,000 jobs.
Such a loss occurred despite a hike in the number of Canadian tourists vacationing in the United States. And it was attributed in large part to a severe decline in the number of Mexican tourists coming to the United States.
Mexican officials have been forthright in stating that the number of Mexican tourists has been badly affected by antagonistic attitudes expressed by the Trump administration; Mexican tourism to Canada, by contrast, has skyrocketed. The head of the U.S. Travel Association, Roger Dow, has been outspoken in warning about the impact on our overall economy of these discouraging tourism figures.
If the United States is ever to overcome the deficit in our balance of payments, he said, attention must be paid to once again welcoming foreign tourism to our shores. And if we are ever to enjoy a yearly increase of 3 percent in our gross domestic product, as the administration promises, the incoming travel deficit must be addressed.
Instead, the decline in tourism remains a grave problem that overwhelms supposed improvements to our national economy.