Trump Tourism Effects

In the past day or two on social media I kept seeing this graph, from a Semafor story on the declining volume of international visitors to the United States. Semafor Graph. It seems to show, and was being remarked on as showing, that the second Trump administration was responsible for a drop in visitors from abroad from some countries on a scale comparable to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. My first thought was “that can’t be true”. And indeed it is not true. I mean, the pandemic shut down air travel almost completely for a while. While the current administration’s actions have been terrible in many ways, and led to direct, negative consequences for tourism, too, they haven’t been on that scale. Something’s wrong with the graph. These numbers come from International Trade Administration’s I-94 arrivals data. THey maintain a spreadsheet that counts all international visitors by country of residence who arrive in the U.S., spend at least one night here, are among qualified visa…